


Wild Nights, Wild Nights

by cassyl



Series: Wild Nights, Wild Nights [1]
Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Case Fic, Drug Use, John-centric, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Mild Gore, Post Reichenbach, References to Suicide, Smoking, questionable medical ethics
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-04-17
Updated: 2013-05-17
Packaged: 2017-12-08 18:02:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 15
Words: 32,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/764345
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cassyl/pseuds/cassyl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If Sherlock had never met John, would he still be on the side of the angels?  On his return from Afghanistan, John takes a job working the night shift at a high secure psychiatric hospital, but when the infamous criminal mastermind Sherlock Holmes is admitted as a patient, John begins to suspect that all is not as it seems.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

It’s only temporary, John tells himself. Just until he figures out what to do next.

Working nights suits him. He’s never minded odd hours – medical school and then the service rid him of any squeamishness on that front – and, anyway, he hasn’t slept through the night once since he got back from Afghanistan.

It’s too quiet here. Even in a city like London, there are too many silences through which memories can creep, insinuating themselves into dreams and shaking him awake.

Just as he’s beginning to feel that he can’t spend another night struggling to breathe in the blank dark, he runs into an old acquaintance from Barts who mentions he’s just heard about a position that would be perfect for an insomniac doctor accustomed to high-pressure situations. “Might be a bit rough,” Mike warns, and John has to tamp down on a smile because Mike has no idea.

Which is how John winds up working the night-shift at a high secure psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of London. As stopgaps go, it’s a good choice for him— within reason. 

The work is challenging enough that John doesn’t get too restless, and he no longer has to spend his nights lying awake in his narrow bed, memorizing the shapes of the shadows that cross his bedroom ceiling. And now, when he does wake up reaching for his gun, his little flat isn’t quite so still, and he can ease himself back to sleep to the sounds of the city living around him. 

It should be lonely, but John needs that distance right now. It’s easier this way. He knows it’s not a permanent solution, but it feels good to just absent himself like this, if only for a little while.

*

‘A little while’ turns into six months, turns into a year. He’s been at the hospital just over a year and a half when Sherlock Holmes arrives.

Holmes’s arrest and the subsequent hospital order have been the talk of the staff and patients alike for weeks. Debate rages about where he’ll be sent – day room betting odds are on Broadmoor – and when the news comes that Holmes is coming _here_ , there’s an uproar. They haven’t had a celebrity patient in years, and to get someone as high-profile as Sherlock Holmes is considered quite a coup. John doesn’t quite understand their enthusiasm.

Of course he knows who Sherlock Holmes is. He reads the papers, watches telly. Even living on the fringes of the daylight world as he does, it would be nearly impossible to avoid at least a peripheral awareness of the Reichenbach Hero and his precipitous fall from grace. But following the story in the news is one thing; getting excited about Holmes’s commitment is quite another. 

John is working an extra shift to cover for a sick colleague the day Holmes is transferred in from the admission ward, so he’s there to see Holmes arrive – him and the rest of the ward. From the crowd that’s gathered, you’d think it was a visit from Kate and Wills. Even old Mr. Braithwaite, who never leaves his room if he can help it, has emerged to witness the arrival of the infamous Sherlock Holmes.

The man who is ushered down the hall looks very little like the self-assured criminal mastermind John’s seen pictured in all the papers. He has the same haughty profile, to be sure, but he looks drawn, his expressionless face almost white. His bearing is upright, but his limbs are loose, offering no resistance. 

Ed and Seamus, two of the toughest members of the security staff, walk alongside him, but Holmes seems utterly indifferent to their presence, walking between them as if he were on his own. As they pass the nurses station, there’s a moment, just briefly, when Holmes turns his head to meet John’s eyes. The directness of that gaze is a jolt deep in the pit of John’s stomach. He’s stitched men back together under heavy shelling and disarmed fifteen-stone paranoid schizophrenics without batting an eye, but for some reason the blank look Holmes gives him knocks the wind out of him. It’s as if the man’s been wiped clean, leaving nothing there at all.

John turns his head to watch – he’s not the only one, everyone in the corridor is staring – as Holmes and his escort pass through the double doors at the end of the hall and disappear.

*

That day, and for the rest of the week that follows, Sherlock Holmes is all the ward can talk about. Roland, the charge nurse, is volubly star-struck when John checks in with him, sharing every scrap of pointless trivia he’s been able to amass, and when John passes the B-block dining hall on his way to his office, he can hear that the quality of the sound in the room has changed, heightened from the usual dull murmur to an electric drone.

As for the man himself, John doesn’t see him again, nor does he expect to. Unless Holmes gets into some kind of scrape one evening, John isn’t likely to see him at all.

John’s role here is largely as a contingency, so that there’s someone on hand in case emergencies flare up in the middle of the night. Despite the reputation of high secure facilities, it’s hardly bedlam here, and the graveyard shift tends to be fairly uneventful, in any case. John was a little concerned that Holmes’s arrival would cause a stir, but so far it’s been quiet. A little too quiet, really, for John’s taste, but, then, that’s meant to be a good thing.

On slow nights, John invents things for himself to do: he chats to the nurses on duty or organizes his desk drawers – anything to avoid working through his endless backlog of paperwork. Often he winds up playing cards with a couple of the insomniac patients, or else he just walks the halls. In the clear, cool quiet of the empty corridors, the only sound is that of his cane on the tiled floor, and for a moment or two, John can imagine he’s entirely alone, that anything could happen. Walking the ward at night is often more restful than his actual rest, a little waking dream of its own.

Which is why, when he turns down a little-used corridor early one pale grey morning and sees a lean figure standing by the window, he isn’t sure, at first, if the man real. But the smell of cigarette smoke is real, and the cool, damp draft blowing down the hall is real, too, and so he says, “How’d you manage to get it open without tripping the alarm?” 

As soon as he’s said it, John catches his mistake. The window itself isn’t open at all. One of the individual panes of glass has been popped out of the frame, leaving just enough room for the dark-haired man to ash his cigarette between the wire grating that covers the outside of the window. “Oh, that’s good – it’s the frame that’s wired up to the alarm, not the individual panes of glass. Brilliant.”

The dark head tilts but doesn’t turn, and John realizes Holmes is watching his reflection in the glass. Then he lifts the cigarette to his lips and takes a long, defiant drag, and John can’t help smiling.

The man’s shirtsleeves have been rolled up to his elbows, so John can see the pale circle of a nicotine patch on his forearm. Nearly all the patients use them, since the smoking ban, nicotine being for many of them a cherished, long-standing form of self-medication. “Patch not cutting it for you?”

Holmes cuts his eyes to the side as if to say, _Obviously_ , and blows a long column of smoke from between his lips, though he aims it conscientiously toward the opening in the window.

John knows he should reprimand him for smoking here, and, for that matter, for being out of bed at this hour. He knows he should page Danny and have Holmes escorted back to his room. He even knows, abstractly, that he should be frightened of this man, who’s killed at least one person in cold blood and engineered dozens of other crimes. But John isn’t frightened. Really, all he feels is impressed that Holmes has managed to get this far without alerting security. So instead of reporting him, he comes up slowly alongside the other man and leans on the windowsill beside him, propping his cane against the wall.

He knows Holmes is looking at him out of the corner of his eye, sizing him up, but he doesn’t let his gaze waver from the listless rain breaking over the roofs of the east wing. Nor does he say what he’s sure countless others have already said to him: _How’d you do it, then, frame that actor for all your crimes?_ Instead, he talks about the weather.

“Supposed to rain all week,” he says idly. “Good thing, too. It’s been quite dry. We could do with a bit of rain.” 

He can feel Holmes shift next to him, an incremental reorientation of his focus.

“I suppose a lot of people find it dreary,” he goes on. “The rain, I mean. Can’t beat England for dismal weather. But, you know, that’s what I missed the most, the overcast skies and the way the air manages to be chill and humid at once. Well,” he adds wryly, “that, and food that wasn’t boiled in the bag.”

In the window, John can see that Holmes is staring at him full-on now, head turned toward him, and he can’t remember ever having been so thoroughly observed. He feels it all the way down to his knees, though by the time John turns to meet his gaze, Holmes is already looking away, his expression studiously blank. With careful calm, he picks a fiber from his tongue with his thumb and ring finger and examines it carefully before flicking it out the window.

“Well,” John says, shoving off from the windowsill, “I’d best be off.” He adjusts his grip on his cane, distributing his weight more comfortably. “But before I go—”

Holmes raises his eyebrows expectantly.

“I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you for your lighter.”

Holmes blows out a disgusted breath but renders up the lighter, dropping it in John’s outstretched hand. “Thanks,” he says genially, tucking it into his pocket. “And don’t forget to put that windowpane back when you’re finished, will you.”

He makes it about ten paces, his cane loud in the silent corridor, before he stops himself. When he turns around, Sherlock Holmes is staring after him, a frown creasing his brow.

“You’ve got about five minutes before Danny comes around on checks,” he says, although he has the feeling that Holmes already knows. And then he turns to go in earnest.

*

When his shift ends, John goes home and looks up everything he can find about Sherlock Holmes. He reads every article Google turns up, combs YouTube for news footage, even scours Holmes’s own website in his effort to piece together the narrative of the Reichenbach Hero’s decline and fall. 

It begins with a consulting detective, promoting his (admittedly extraordinary) services via a modest website, brought to the attention of the national media by a string of high-profile cases, including the return of that notorious Turner painting that earned him his nickname. He didn’t court the attention, refusing to give interviews, trying to shield his face from the cameras’ invasive gaze, but his reticence only stoked the flames of public opinion. The buzz built around him, culminating in the daring heist at Tower Hill by ‘James Moriarty’, the subsequent court case, and Richard Brook’s revelation that he’d been hired by Holmes to stage all of Moriarty’s crimes. Shortly after that awful exposé ran in _The Sun_ , Holmes was discovered in his flat by the police, nearly dead from a drug overdose, Richard Brook’s corpse on the floor next to him. Holmes was arrested for Brook’s murder, as well as all the crimes he’d previously tried to pin on ‘Moriarty’. The tabloids had a field day – ‘ATTEMPTED SUICIDE OF FAKE GENIUS,’ the headlines read – and most of the press had already decided that the gunpowder residue on Holmes’s shirtfront was proof positive of his guilt, but before a jury had a chance to decide, the judge approved a hospital order for Holmes and the trial was over before it’d even begun. 

There was quite an uproar. The official story was that he was being institutionalized because of his suicide attempt, but the papers made murky intimations about strings being pulled in the highest levels of government to accommodate some kind of dark mental health history. John finds very little in the way of real fact, just lots of wild speculation and hearsay.

But whatever behind-the-scenes dealings led to Holmes being committed rather than tried, the end result is the same: the world’s only consulting detective is left smoking silently in the middle of the night in a high secure psychiatric facility.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sherlock's trick with the windowpane is borrowed from _Elementary_.


	2. Chapter 2

Holmes isn’t by the window the next time John comes around on his early morning walk, and he feels a twinge of regret that he might have scared him off. He knows he ought to have reported the incident, but somehow he can’t begrudge anyone a little solace, no matter who they are or what they’re meant to have done.  
Besides, he wouldn’t mind a bit of company from time to time.

John spends most of his shifts on his own. Since he gets into work as dinner is winding down and leaves in the early hours before breakfast, he misses out on most of the action. Patients are required to be out of their rooms between the hours of nine A.M. and five P.M., but by the time John arrives, most everyone is either in bed, waiting for their medication kick in, or else they’re congregated in the rec room for _You’ve Been Framed!_ B-block has notoriously bad taste in television, although John has passed some very pleasant evenings watching reruns of _Antiques Roadshow_ with a serial arsonist named Anton.

One night, though, he’s barely clocked in and is on his way to his office when he hears raised voices, the sound of a chair being violently shoved back against tile flooring. Never one to miss the chance to run toward conflict, John jogs as quickly as his cane will allow toward the source of the noise.

He rounds the corner and staggers into the rec room just in time to see Bill Mitchell – DSPD, six foot ten and twenty solid stone – punch Sherlock Holmes in the face.

Holmes’s head snaps back and the spray of blood is immediate as he reels backward. John expects him to fall but he doesn’t. He catches himself, swaying on his feet. John realizes Holmes is grinning, blood bright across his face.

Mitchell lunges for another blow, but then Holmes’s momentum shifts, and he’s scooping Mitchell’s extended arm up close between their bodies and delivering a brutal strike to his throat that sends Mitchell crumpling to the ground.

There’s so much shouting – the patients yelling in alarm, the nurses calling for order – but Holmes is totally silent, standing over Mitchell’s prostrate body with his chest heaving and a smirk curling his blood-wet lips.

When Danny darts forward to pull him back, Holmes shakes Danny’s hand off in one fluid motion but lets himself be herded away from Mitchell. 

John kneels down to check Mitchell’s vitals – just out cold, though John reckons he’ll be feeling that fall for a few days. Never mind the time it’ll take him to live down being bested by a twig like Holmes. “Someone get him to his room,” John says, and Aziz and Seamus swoop in to drag Mitchell’s dead weight back to the side rooms. “You, Holmes, come with me.”

Danny makes a move to protest, but John cuts him off with a jerk of his head. “You take care of this,” he says, gesturing to the other patients, who’re still riled up from the fight. “You can come collect him when everything’s settled here.”

“Come on, then,” he says briskly to Holmes, who only hesitates a moment before following him out of the rec room.

They walk side by side down the silent halls, neither speaking. Holmes’s shirtfront is splashed in red and his nose is dripping blood, but his expression is not the least bit repentant.

John’s heart is racing and, really, he shouldn’t be so delighted over a bit of bloodshed, but at least it gives him something to do. “Just through here,” he says when they reach the infirmary.

Inside, he gestures for Holmes to sit down on the padded exam chair. Holmes elects to stand, surveying the locked Perspex supply cabinet with an appraising eye.

“I’m just going to tidy you up a bit before I have a look at that nose, all right?” John smiles mildly and inclines his head toward the chair once more.

Holmes sits down, but only just, as if the act of seating himself is an imposition on his dignity. How he’s retained any dignity at all in here John doesn’t know, but he has. He appears remarkably unruffled by this altercation. Even drenched in blood, his shirt is crisp and white.

John snaps on a pair of gloves. “This might sting a bit.”

Holmes sits stock still as John leans in and bathes the blood from his face. There’s a lot of it, already crusted around his nostrils and at the corners of his mouth. More blood has insinuated itself in the fine creases of his neck, and John finds the act of wiping it away shockingly intimate. With any other patient, it would be nothing more than routine, but Holmes is watching him with unerring attention, his whole body seemingly attuned to John’s slightest movement, though he hardly moves even to breathe. He has a small freckle at the base of his neck, and this too John wipes clean.

Once most of the blood is gone, John can properly assess the damage. “You might want to brace yourself,” he cautions, and Holmes looks down that battered nose at him as if this is the stupidest suggestion he’s ever heard. His eyes, John notices, are a grey so pure they’re almost clear. 

“Right. Well . . . Here we go, then.” Taking Holmes’s face gently in his hand, he explores the fracture, testing it as gently as he can. Holmes doesn’t so much as flinch.

“Obviously it’s fractured, but it’s not disjointed, so there’s no need to set it,” John says, wiping more blood from Holmes’s face. “It’s not bad, all things considered. Shouldn’t even be too much swelling.” It would be a shame to spoil that aristocratic profile. John clears his throat and sets about stuffing cotton up Holmes’s nostrils.

When he’s satisfied, John hands Holmes an ice pack and asks, “So what was the fight over, then?”

“ ‘What Happens Next?’.” His voice is adenoidal from the swelling and the cotton, but it’s the note of impatience that makes the corner of John’s mouth jerk up – not quite a smile, but he can’t help it.

“Oh? What about it?”

Holmes raises his eyebrows in an expression of scorn that borders on pity. “I told him what happened next.”

And then John is laughing outright, a sort of high, breathless giggle he can’t remember indulging in for years.

When he looks over, Holmes is smiling, too, a dark, thin smile that makes something inside John twist. “It’s Sherlock, by the way,” he says, as if they are truly meeting for the first time.

“Sherlock,” John echoes. “I’m John.”

“Yes,” Sherlock says. “I know.”

*

It’s not until later, when Danny comes back to have him check on Bill Mitchell, that John has a chance to ask about the incident.

“Did they really come to blows over _You’ve Been Framed!_?” John asks as they walk down the hall toward the side rooms.

“Oh, yeah,” Danny says. “He guesses ‘What Happens Next?’ every time they watch that bloody show, and he always gets it right, the bastard. I think he does it just to wind them up.”

“And the fight?”

“I guess he spoiled the surprise one too many times.”

John tucks his free hand in his pockets, trying hard not to smile. “Christ.” Of all the daft, reckless things to do, Sherlock’s getting his kicks baiting one of the ward’s most dangerous residents. John’s seen a lot of kinds of crazy since he started working here, but Mitchell’s not the type John would want to cross even in the best of circumstances. 

Still, he can’t help being impressed. Sherlock’s a vision in a fight, all lithe, fluid grace, totally fearless. He put Mitchell on the ground without batting an eye, and, what’s more, he enjoyed it. Johns knows that ought to worry him, frighten him even, but he can’t help wishing he could see it again.

*

John doesn’t see Sherlock again for a while after that, probably because his privileges have been restricted as a result of the fight. It’s oddly quiet without him, as if the entire ward feels his absence. Though if his performance in the rec room is any indication, that quiet is also a sigh of relief.

Nothing changes about John’s days. He comes in every evening, leaves to run his errands in the cool calm early morning hush, and falls asleep in his small beige bedroom to the sound of the city waking up. He sees after a patient who slipped in the loo, and another who’d been saving up his pills for months. He reorganizes all the supplies in the infirmary. Life goes on as usual.

John still walks the halls in the small hours of the night, when there’s nothing else to do and the air in his office starts to become a palpable weight on his skin.

He’s progressing along his usual route through the ward one damp evening when he notices that the door to the library is open. He knows for a fact that the library is supposed to be locked at night, but tonight the door is ever so slightly ajar, almost an invitation.

John pushes the door open and steps into the library, on his guard. 

There’s a faint glow coming from the small collection of furniture in the middle of the room, and John creeps forward to find Sherlock slung over one of the sofas, reading a book with a pen light. In the light’s thin glow, John can see the book is called _The Origin of Tree Worship_ , and he wonders wryly where Sherlock got ahold of it. It seems unlikely that it’s from the hospital’s collection, which contains mostly potboilers and some bad science fiction. One of the staff offices, on the other hand . . .

Huffing out a laugh, John sinks into one of the chairs opposite Sherlock’s sofa. “How’s the nose?”

When Sherlock doesn’t reply, John just lets him read in silence, taking the opportunity to study the other man. He’s dressed in a sharp white shirt and expensive-looking trousers – someone must have sent him some clothes since he was admitted. His feet are bare and so white they glow slightly in the gloom. The contours of his face are so familiar from all the media coverage and yet at the same time intensely foreign. Sherlock’s little torch casts his features into sharp relief, making him all cutting cheekbones and leaving a dark space where his eyes should be. As he was before, John is struck by how intense Sherlock’s focus is, as if everything outside the page in front of him has fallen away entirely.

When he catches Sherlock glancing over at him, he takes it as an invitation to speak. “Look, I just wanted to let you know . . . I’m not going to tell anyone about the other night in the corridor. Or about this, for that matter.” He tries a smile.

Sherlock considers him for a long time, his eyes guarded in shadow, his expression almost impossibly still. Then he nods and turns back to his book.

It’s almost companionable, the silence that falls between them. It has no business being comfortable, but it is. 

It should probably be worrying that the only person he’s felt at ease around since coming home from Afghanistan is a known sociopath who’s engineered more murders, thefts, and swindles than anyone can count. He’s sure that says something less-than-good about him and his capacity to adapt to civilian life. But, really, it’s been so long since he’s felt anything but adrift that he can’t bring himself to care.

After a while, John gets up and picks a book up off the shelf. In return, Sherlock reaches out and pulls the cord on a lamp beside his sofa, filling the room with warm light.

*

That morning, when he goes to sleep, John dreams of Sherlock Holmes. He dreams that he’s only just returned from the war and that Mike Stamford, rather than fixing him up with a job, introduces him to a handsome, corrosive detective who offers him a flatshare and a place in the world helping to solve the crimes no one else can crack. He dreams that they run through the London-bright nighttime streets until they’re out of breath and laughing, wild. It’s a very strange dream. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> _You've Been Framed!_ is an ITV program not unlike _America's Funniest Home Videos_ , which includes a segment called "What Happens Next?" where a frozen video clip is presented before a break and the audience has to guess what will happen next. Of course, Sherlock always guesses correctly.
> 
> DSPD is a non-clinical category for offenders with "dangerous and severe personality disorders".
> 
> I'm writing about mental healthcare in the UK from the perspective of someone who's not experienced mental healthcare in the UK first-hand. I've done my best to be informed, but I've also taken some liberties for the sake of the story. That said, I would heartily welcome comments and critiques on this subject -- or any subject, really.


	3. Chapter 3

“So I hear you had your first run-in with our local celebrity.” 

John looks up to see Roland, the charge nurse and occasional fourth in late-night staff poker games, looking at him expectantly. “Sorry?”

John wouldn’t have though it possible, but Roland’s eyebrows rise even further up his forehead. “Sherlock?”

“Oh. Er—” For one breathless moment, John tries to work out whether Roland is talking about his encounter with Sherlock in the library or that night in the corridor, wondering which is more likely to get him fired and what excuse he could possibly offer. And then he realizes it’s neither. No doubt everyone’s heard about Sherlock’s fight with Bill Mitchell by now, and it was bound to get around that John was the one who patched Sherlock up. “Yes.”

“Well?” Roland asks.

John shakes his head, not comprehending.

“What do you think?” It’s clear that Roland is trying to restrain his excitement, but he’s doing a crap job of it. 

“He, ah . . .” John realizes he hasn’t the slightest idea how to sum Sherlock up. “He definitely keeps you on your toes.”

“Well, yeah,” Roland says dismissively, “but d’you think he really did everything they say he did?”

John doesn’t know what he thinks. It’s true that he enjoys Sherlock’s company, if rather against his better judgment, and it’s also true that he may have overlooked certain infractions on Sherlock’s part, but it had never even occurred to him that Sherlock might not have committed the crimes of which he was accused. After all, he’s here, and in John’s experience, nobody winds up here unless they’re in need of serious help. 

Really, the idea that Sherlock might actually be innocent is absurd. Granted, he can’t imagine who would go to all the trouble of inventing an archenemy for himself, but, then, John can’t really imagine who has archenemies anymore to begin with. It’s all rather arcane, like something out of a Victorian penny dreadful – Wilkie Collins or Poe or somebody. It does seem like the sort of story someone could only make up.

The papers have made Sherlock out to be a monster, and maybe he is. John certainly doesn’t have any trouble believing him capable of— well, pretty much anything. But he can’t help thinking of the footage from the trial, which he’s watched on YouTube more times than he’d care to admit, showing Sherlock, still pale and drawn from his overdose, being escorted out of the Old Bailey as if in slow-motion. “The defendant showed no emotion when the charges were read,” the papers claimed at the time, but John thinks he recognized some flicker of feeling in that still face.

On the other side of the nurses station, Roland is still talking. “ ‘Cause, see, there’s some people who think he was set up. Can you imagine that?”

John makes a noncommittal noise at the back of his throat, distracted all of a sudden by the sense that he’s being watched.

“I mean, how dull would that be?” Roland’s expression is one of pure disdain. “A genius like Sherlock, and they’re saying he’s just some dupe. The thing is, people can’t handle how clever he really is. It’s easier for them to call him a freak or a psychopath, right, than it is for them to see how brilliant his plan actually was.”

Roland is really gearing up now, and John watches him with dull horror, remembering acutely why he limits the conversation to popular entertainment and sport whenever Roland joins evening card games. Most of the staff here do this job because they believe mentally ill offenders deserve to be treated instead of simply incarcerated, or because, like John, they happen to have a certain skillset that makes them well-suited to working with dangerous patients. But John has the unpleasant sense that Roland’s here because he likes these people, admires them even. He has the feeling he’d be quite angry right now if he were actually listening to Roland with more than half an ear. Luckily, most of his attention is focused on trying to figure out why the skin between his shoulder blades has gone hypersensitive.

He half expects to see Sherlock watching him from some dim corner, but it’s just him and Roland in the corridor. The hallway is silent, no hint of motion.

Then, out of the corner of his eye, he catches a flash of movement, and turns just in time to realize that the only thing watching him is the wandering gaze of a security camera. 

“—Don’t you think?” Roland asks breathlessly.

“Hm?”

“The ambassador’s kids,” Roland prompts. “It’s obvious they knew who he was.”

“Oh, yeah,” John says, without the slightest idea what he’s agreeing to. “Must be.”

John extricates himself from the conversation before Roland can get himself too worked up and retreats to his office. And if he has the feeling that all of the cameras are turning to watch him pass, he tells himself that’s just a bit of Roland’s conspiracy theory fervor lingering in the air.

Back in his office, because it’s 3 AM and his leg is aching and he’s got nothing better to distract himself, he Googles “SHERLOCK HOLMES” + INNOCENT. Most of the results he gets seem to have been composed by the sort of people who marry convicted serial killers, more concerned with rhapsodizing over Sherlock’s sharp cheekbones than analyzing evidence. He can’t argue with the superlative quality of Sherlock’s features, but he’s fairly certain that brooding good looks aren’t enough to clear one of a murder charge. Still, it might make worthwhile ammunition the next time Roland launches into one of his tinfoil hat tirades.

*

When he lets himself into his office the following evening, there’s someone sitting at his desk.

The man’s back is to the door, and for a second, from the sweep of dark hair visible over the top of the chair, he thinks it’s Sherlock, but then he turns around and John knows he’s wrong.

“Good evening, Dr. Watson,” the intruder says pleasantly. He wears an immaculate suit and a look of implacable calm. He’s plainly not wearing any kind of staff ID or visitor’s pass and his hands are braced on the wooden handle of an umbrella. 

“Visiting hours are over,” John says. His voice comes out flat.

“Yes, but I’m not here to visit a patient. I’m here to see you.”

John curls his hand more tightly around the grip of his cane. “And why would you want to do that?”

“I’m interested in you, John. It seemed high time we met.”

“Well?” He spreads his free hand, expectant. “Here I am.”

The man smiles indulgently, and John clenches his teeth. “Tell me,” the man says, “what is your relationship to Sherlock Holmes?”

This is exactly the last question John is expecting. “I don’t have one,” he says, although he realizes this isn’t precisely true. “And even if I did, I can’t see how it could possibly be any of your business.”

“It could be,” replies the man contemplatively.

“It really couldn’t.”

“And yet, you seem quite intent on making him _your_ business.”

John feels his shoulders go even tighter. Other than to Danny and Roland, he’s only ever expressed his interest in Sherlock to his search engine. “What is that supposed to mean?” If this is about John not reporting Sherlock, he’d rather the man just came out and said it.

“Do you believe Sherlock Holmes is innocent, Dr. Watson?” John’s shock must show on his face, because the man smiles. “You see, if you were interested in investigating the matter . . .” Here he pauses to confirm that John appreciates the import of what he’s about to say, as if it would be possible to miss. “ . . . I might be inclined to offer you a not-inconsiderable sum to report your findings to me.”

“And why would you do that?” 

“I only have his best interests at heart, I assure you. I do so worry about him here.” He glances around John’s office, as if this room in particular is somehow at fault.

John gives a sharp shake of his head. “You can keep your money.”

“Do you mean to tell me you _don’t_ intend to pursue the matter?”

“I mean that if I were going to – _if_ – it wouldn’t be because you or anyone else paid me to.”

At this, the man in the suit smiles, and this time it’s not the tight, insincere smile he put on earlier, but something slower, more satisfied. “I feel I must warn you, Dr. Watson: forming an association with Sherlock Holmes carries with it certain . . . risks, you might say.”

“I never said I was forming an ‘association’ with anyone,” he snaps, having just about reached his threshold for cryptic bullshit.

“Nor, I suspect, would you shy away from a little danger, would you, Captain?”

And, all right, that’s it. Knowing his name and his search history is one thing, but this man’s got no right to talk about John’s service history as if he knows anything about it. “Who the hell are you?”

“Just an interested party,” the man says benignly. “As you are, yourself.”

John’s fingers are going numb around the handle of his cane. “Is that what I am?”

“Oh, I should say so, yes. Because you’ve seen it, haven’t you? What it’s like to stand beside Sherlock Holmes? To see the world come alive to its full potential, every detail significant, and often dangerous— It can be quite . . . exhilarating. And now you’ve seen it, you couldn’t possibly bear to look away.” 

Checking his watch, the intruder shapes a regretful frown. “Ah, I’m afraid I really must be going.” He rises, using the umbrella to support his weight, and eases around the desk. “Good night, John, and good luck.” With that, passes John and disappears out the door.

John stands there for a long moment, paralyzed by the sense that he’s just very narrowly dodged some kind of obscure bullet, and by the time he leans out into the hall to look around, there’s no sign of the man at all.

“What in hell was that,” he asks the empty room. He doesn’t get an answer.

As the adrenaline that crashed through him at the sight of the man begins to fade, he sags down into his desk chair and rests his head in his hands.

This is mad. It’s just that simple. He’s made friends with a sociopathic criminal mastermind and now someone’s caught on and has come to – what? – bribe him into helping prove Sherlock’s innocence? Can that even be done?

John doesn’t know. But if he wanted to find out, there’s one sure place to start. 

He knows he’s treading a fine line – hell, if he’s being honest with himself, he’s already well over the line – but he also knows that he won’t be able to put this behind him until he gets some answers. He tries to rationalize the decision by telling himself that he’s just looking out for a patient, but there’s no point in dressing it up in good intentions. Mostly he just needs to know.

So he pulls Sherlock’s file. 

Or, at least, he tries to. But he can’t, because there is no file. 

No matter how he keys the information into the system, there’s no patient on record between “Holmes, Michael” (no relation) and “Howley, Mark,” just a gap where Sherlock Holmes should be.

Alone in the quiet, white office, John says, “Huh.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thanks to everyone who's read and left such kind comments so far, particularly the anon who brought up the credibility of this depiction of a psychiatric facility. While this is fiction and I'm taking some pretty extreme liberties, I really appreciate the reality check. I've made some small changes to previous chapters to try and alleviate a little bit of the pressure on one's suspension of disbelief, and will do my best to keep this in mind going forward.
> 
> Please, keep the comments and critiques coming. I'm very grateful.


	4. Chapter 4

John decides that the best way to confront this is head-on. The next time he sees Sherlock, he’s just going to ask him. He’s going to get a straight answer out of him if it kills him, and he’s a surprisingly hard man to kill.

But when they finally run into one another in the still, late-night quiet of the empty rec room, Sherlock’s turns to him and says, “Would you like to see the roof?”

John experiences a lurch that is the intellectual equivalent of loosing his footing. “The—?” 

“—roof, yes,” Sherlock repeats slowly. “I thought you might appreciate the view.”

“Oh,” John says. And he knows he shouldn’t, knows, objectively, that it’s wildly inappropriate to encourage a patient to attempt to leave the facility, that this man is a criminal, a suspected murderer, a master manipulator. But then he thinks of the rest of the night stretching pale and empty ahead of him, of the beige, bland bed waiting for him at home, and finds himself saying, “All right.”

And just like that, Sherlock is off down the corridor. John, slower with his bad leg, has to fight to keep up.

He follows Sherlock out into the stairwell, the door to which is unlocked, although John knows that can’t be right because it’s supposed to be locked at all hours. From there, they climb up another flight of stairs until they reach a door marked ‘ROOF ACCESS.’ John didn’t even know this was here, and he’s certain it should be locked, too, but Sherlock just pushes through as if he comes here all the time. Maybe, John thinks, he does.

The sky is overcast, the heavy air threatening more rain, but for the moment the weather is holding, and the breeze is wonderfully sharp up here. It cuts straight through John’s white coat, and he relishes the sting. 

Sherlock wastes no time retrieving a lighter, which apparently he’d cached in the narrow gap behind an electrical box mounted on the concrete wall of the stairwell. Of course he’d have a spare. John should’ve known. Producing a cigarette from his breast pocket, Sherlock lights up, breathing in that first lungful of smoke with nothing short of bone-deep relief. For a moment, he just stands there, head tipped back, eyes fixed on the grey sky. Finally, after what seems to John to be a painfully long time, he drops his head and exhales, ringing himself in a wreath of smoke. 

John notices then that Sherlock is practically vibrating, a tension under his skin that is barely restrained by the effects of the nicotine. He seems full of potential energy, and it’s terrifying and beautiful to see. 

As if he’s heard John speak, Sherlock turns to look at him, his fingers – long, articulate, and pale – ghosting along the edge of his lips.

“You were right,” John says. “The view’s not half-bad.”

They both take a moment to consider the hospital complex stretched out below them. It’s lovely, really, all Victorian architecture and shivering green trees, the glow of London pale on the horizon. If it weren’t for the razor wire along the tops of the walls, they might almost be able to forget where they are. Standing up here looking down at the city, John feels suddenly very far away from absolutely everything.

“You miss it.”

The words send a shock over John’s chilled skin. He turns to see Sherlock still watching him. “What?”

“The war. You’ve been back a while now,” he says, his eyes roving over John intently, “but you’re hanging onto it, desperately, like a drowning man with a rope.”

“How can you possibly . . . ?”

Sherlock’s lips twist into a wry smile, but he doesn’t answer. “Not a terribly apt metaphor – it’s a common misconception about drowning, actually, all the thrashing around and screaming. Most drowning victims don’t have the wherewithal to grab for a rope. They just sink right down.”

John thinks he knows the feeling. “Who _are_ you?”

Sherlock’s eyebrows lift languidly. “Why don’t you tell me?” He sounds almost amused. “After all, you’re the one who’s been researching me.”

John doesn’t even bother to ask how Sherlock knows. Whether he’s been using it for good or ill, there’s no denying that the man has an incredible intellect. If he knows about Afghanistan, of course he knows John’s been looking into his history. It’s probably written in the wrinkles on his shirt or the crease between his eyebrows.

“Right,” John says, squaring his shoulders. “You were a private detective—”

“Consulting detective.”

“You were a _consulting detective_ who got involved in a bunch of high-profile cases, including the so-called James Moriarty’s triple-threat assault on Pentonville, Bank of England, and the Tower of London. After he was acquitted, he accused you of hiring him to stage your crimes, then promptly died in your flat, and you were accused of his murder.”

“So far so obvious.” There’s a faint smirk on Sherlock’s lips. He’s enjoying this.

“What’s _not_ obvious is what you’re doing here.”

Sherlock sighs noisily, making a show of his annoyance. “Surely you of all people know that the outward appearance of sanity doesn’t preclude madness.”

“I’m not talking about your mental health. What I want to know is, how in hell does someone wind up in a high secure psychiatric facility without a shred of paperwork to show for it?”

“Very good,” Sherlock say approvingly, his eyes bright, avid. “Now that is a question worth asking.”

John’s fingers curl more tightly around the handle of his cane. “I had an offer, you know.”

“Oh?”

“Someone broke into my office and offered me money to prove you were innocent.”

Sherlock’s eyes narrow, his expression appraising. “Did you take it?”

“No,” John says.

“That’s . . . good.”

John tilts his head. “Is it?”

The smirk on Sherlock’s lips blossoms into something indulgent, almost fond, but the answer he gives is not an answer to the question John’s just asked. “You mentioned MREs.”

There it is again, that feeling the rug’s been yanked out from under him. “Sorry?”

“That’s how I knew about the war,” he explains. “Well, your military career was obvious long before that, of course, but that was what clinched it: that night you caught me smoking, you spoke of field rations fondly, the way some people do of favorite foods from childhood. You miss the front now more than you ever missed England when you were overseas. It was home, and you still haven’t got used to being anywhere else.

“So you’re hanging on to what little you have left of the war. Your haircut, for instance. You’ve kept your hair short, haven’t grown it out now that you’re a civilian again. That could be habit, or an aesthetic decision – it does bring out your features rather nicely – if it weren’t for that cane of yours.”

“What about it?” John asks numbly.

Sherlock rolls his eyes. “You’re holding onto it like it’s the only thing in the world supporting you at the moment – just look, your knuckles are white – but you don’t put your full weight on it when you walk, and you don’t sit down when you’re at rest, like you would if your leg really hurt you. Ergo, you don’t actually need the cane – at least not to walk with. No, you need it for a different sort of support entirely. You’re a doctor. You must know your limp is psychosomatic, but it’s the only connection you have left to the war, the only way to feel that it really happened. You’ve only ever defined yourself as a soldier, and even a wounded soldier is better than no soldier at all. You don’t want to give that up, because if you do, you have to face the question of what comes next, and you’re not ready to do that yet.”

“No,” John says quietly. “I’m not.” It feels good to say it aloud.

That smug smile unfolds again, but his eyes are still guarded, narrow. “So tell me, Doctor. Since you’re apparently above monetary incentives, what do you get out of this?” One able hand gestures between them, from his chest toward John’s, his cigarette trailing a thin line of smoke. “Does it make you feel like a good man, fighting to defend my honor? Does it give you a sense of purpose after all this time?”

John honestly doesn’t know the answer to that question, but Sherlock must see something in his face that he takes as confirmation, because he says, “How noble of you. My knight in shining armor.”

“I’m not—”

“No,” he says shortly. “You’re not.” His eyes trail up and down John’s body, his expression unreadable. “So allow me to spare you the trouble and tell you outright.” He steps closer, and John’s lungs fill with the smell of cigarette smoke and night air and cool skin. “There’s nothing left in me to be redeemed, so you might as well not even bother trying.”

He says it matter-of-factly, quite unsentimental, but John is suddenly breathless, dizzy. “Now, see, that I don’t believe.”

“No?”

John’s just as surprised by his words as Sherlock is, perhaps even more surprised to find they’re true. “Sorry, no.”

Something fractures in Sherlock’s dark gaze, like he wants, badly, to believe John, but the next moment that yearning is gone, replaced by something very sharp and very cold. “You really should.” His voice is low. “For your own sake, if nothing else.” He tips his head, contemplative. “But then, maybe you enjoy it.”

God, when did he get so close? They’re practically breathing the same air, Sherlock tall before him, looming over him in a way that should be intimidating but just feels almost unbearably intimate. John’s ears are buzzing. 

“Ah, yes, that’s it.” A thin smile curls his lips. His voice is almost pure vibration now. “Are you having fun, John? Playing the savior, trying to exonerate me? You don’t need to invent an excuse to get close, you know. I’m right here.”

His free hand, the one not holding the cigarette, snakes down between their bodies, his palm flush against the front of John’s trousers.

“What—” John tries to step back, but Sherlock’s other arm is tight around him, pulling him in.

“Don’t be tedious,” he says as he undoes John’s belt and fly one-handed and insinuates his fingers into John’s pants. 

Sherlock’s aim is unerring. 

John sucks in a breath, as much from the cold as from the wild surge of desire rocking through him. God, this is so wrong, he’s wrong for wanting this, but he can smell how turned on he is, and he knows that Sherlock can too.

“Like that, John,” he says, “just like that.” His strokes are brisk and awkward in the confined space of John’s trousers, but still his touch makes John’s thighs shake. His fingers slide around John’s cock, curling tight and brutal, and John knows he’s not going to last long.

John’s breathing is loud in the wet air, harsh and desperate over the slick slide of Sherlock’s fist. Sherlock’s thumb plays over his glans, just the slightest scrape of the edge of his nail making John’s hips jerk.

“Jesus,” he gasps, and Sherlock twists his wrist. “Oh, Jesus, fuck.” John grabs Sherlock’s arm, to pull his hand away or keep it close he can’t say, and anyway it doesn’t matter because it’s over before he can decide. He comes shuddering all over Sherlock’s hand, his mouth open in a silent sob.

Sherlock lets him go as soon as he’s finished, and John staggers back, unbalanced. He reaches out again, but only to wipe his hand on John’s shirttails. Then he glances down at his cigarette and, finding it burned out, gives it a disdainful look before flicking it away. It tumbles, sparking, across the concrete roof. 

John’s still catching his breath when Sherlock leans in close and for a second John thinks he’s going to kiss him. But instead he says, “You won’t fix me or solve me or save me, so spare us both the trouble and don’t try.” 

The strangeness of this whole scenario – the dark, the quiet, the sleeping city stretching far beyond the red brick walls – collapses in on John and he can’t help asking, “What are you doing here?”

“Never theorize before you have all the evidence, Dr. Watson,” Sherlock cuts in. “I think you’ll find I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.”

Then, just as abruptly as he closed in, he’s striding away and pulling open the door to the stairwell. He hesitates in the doorway for one last second, caught in the washed out light of the stairs. “Good night, John.” His voice is dark and sultry and cool, disappearing into the night air.


	5. Chapter 5

John knows he can never allow what happened between him and Sherlock on the roof to happen again. He knows this. If anyone ever finds out, it will mean his job and his license, at the very least. 

The smartest thing to do – the safest, the sanest – would be to put aside his interest in Sherlock Holmes before he compromises himself any more than he already has. If he were smart, he would change his evening routes around the hospital. He would transfer to a position on a different ward. He would resign his job and get the hell out before it’s too late. 

But he knows he won’t. 

Because the thing is, John let this happen. Worse, he wanted it to happen. And now, well, the man with the umbrella was right: John’s seen what it’s like to stand beside Sherlock Holmes, and he’s not sure how he could ever go back.

If he’s going to stand beside Sherlock, though, he has to know what he’s getting himself into. He wants – he needs – to know the truth.

Sherlock told him not to theorize before he had all the evidence, and John intends to take him at his word. He still isn’t sure what he thinks of Sherlock, but he knows that if he’s going to figure that out, he needs to begin with the facts.

It’s obvious he’s not going to find answers in the press. He’s read pages and pages of newspaper articles and he doesn’t feel any closer to understanding anything about who Sherlock Holmes really is. Those articles are pure, ugly sensationalism, bloodthirsty. All the tabloids want to do is flay Sherlock open and expose him to a bright light. 

He tried turning to Sherlock’s hospital records, but there are none. As far as the hospital’s concerned, he might as well not even exist.

And God knows he won’t get a straight answer out of the man himself. When John confronted him, if anything, Sherlock tried to convince him of his own guilt. He says he doesn’t want John’s help, that he is beyond help altogether.

But John can’t bring himself to believe that. And so here he is, dialing the number for New Scotland Yard and asking to speak to Detective Inspector Lestrade.

The way John sees it, if there’s anyone who might be able to tell him first-hand what really happened, it’s the DI who bore the brunt of the media outrage for letting Sherlock consult on his cases. 

He’s put on hold for a very long time before being transferred to a woman who identifies herself as Detective Inspector Donovan. When he asks why he can’t speak to Lestrade, she tells him curtly that DI Lestrade is on leave, and that any queries he has regarding the Holmes case should be addressed to her.

Well, bollocks to that, John decides. If the military’s taught him anything, it’s exactly how far he’ll get with some bureaucratic second-in-command, so he thanks DI Donovan, hangs up, and gets right back on the phone to find a home address for Lestrade. Not surprisingly, there’s only one person by that name listed for the London metropolitan area.

John gets up early to pay a call on Lestrade before he starts his shift. The house is the picture of comfortable Metroland living: a handsome turn-of-the-century semi with a small garden and a respectable silver Jetta parked out front. It’s exactly the sort of life John had in mind for himself once, though now the thought of it makes him vaguely nervous.

Lestrade opens the door in a bathrobe thrown hastily over his pajamas. He’s washed out, his unshaven cheeks nearly the same color as his greying hair. John recognizes his pallor as that of a man who’s been drinking heavily and sleeping poorly. Considering everything John’s read recently, he can’t really blame Lestrade on either count. 

“Yeah?” 

“My name’s John Watson. I wanted to talk to you about Sherlock Holmes.”

Lestrade’s whole demeanor changes, his eyes narrowing, his back straightening out of its fatigued slump. “You a reporter?”

John shakes his head. “I’m a doctor.”

For a long moment, Lestrade considers this, watching John carefully. “Are you—” He hesitates, as if the thought pains him. “—his doctor?”

“Not that kind of doctor,” John replies. “I work at Rotherhithe. I’m afraid I can’t really say much else.”

Lestrade is smart enough to put two and two together. Knowing that John works at the hospital where Sherlock is a patient, the fact that he can’t speak about Sherlock directly can only mean that John is, in some capacity, personally connected to the man’s care. John watches as Lestrade weighs his options. Finally, slowly, he steps back and jerks his head inward, beckoning John inside.

The house is nice, or at least it was at some point in the not-too-distant past. The rooms are tastefully decorated but the curtains are drawn and the air is stale, creating a dim, claustrophobic atmosphere. In the front hall, there are several photos of Lestrade with a pretty blonde; John wonders where she is now. 

Beckoning for John to follow, Lestrade leads the way into a small front parlor strewn haphazardly with old newspapers and empty plates, some of which he clears from a chair before offering it to John. 

“What is it you want to know?” Lestrade asks, easing himself onto the sofa.

John hopes his smile comes off as harmless and self-effacing. “I suppose I was hoping to talk to someone who actually knows him.”

“I’m not sure I can help you there.”

“I understand if you don’t quite trust me.” He shrugs. “Why would you? But I promise you, I’m not interested in selling your story to the paper, or anything like that.”

“No,” Lestrade says carefully. “What I mean is, I’ve known Sherlock almost seven years, and I’m not sure I know him any better than you do.” He sighs heavily, his shoulders sagging again, and John gets a glimpse of the full extent of the toll recent events have taken on him. “Look, a lot of what people have said about Sherlock is true. He’s a bloody nightmare to work with, and he can be unbelievably cruel. Heartless, really. But – and I don’t know if anyone would agree with me on this, because, believe me, he’s made a lot of enemies – but I do think he’s a good man, if not a very nice one.”

“Are you saying you don’t think Sherlock is capable of doing what they say he did?” John has a brief, unpleasant flash of Roland’s eager face, and clenches his teeth.

“Oh, no, he’s definitely capable,” Lestrade says quickly. “But I trusted Sherlock, and . . .” He shakes his head. “I can’t believe I was wrong to do it.”

John nods. That sounds about right. On reflection, that was part of what put him off about his conversation with Sherlock’s ‘interested party’ in his office the other night: while John might be willing to entertain the possibility that Sherlock’s case is more complicated than it appears, he would never characterize the man as ‘innocent.’

“Can you think of anyone else who might be willing to talk to me about him?” John asks. “Friends, or . . . ?” Even as he says it, he knows this is the wrong tack, and Lestrade’s wry smile confirms it.

“There was a string of flatmates, but none of them lasted very long. He wasn’t what you’d call easy to get on with.”

John can imagine.

“He’s got a brother, Mycroft, but from what I understand they’re not close.” He inclines his head, thoughtful. “The only person I can think of who was willing to put up with him is his landlady, and she’s in hospital herself.”

“Jesus. What happened?”

“She was shot, actually. Right in the middle of the street, on her way back from the shops. Same day as Sherlock . . .” He gestures broadly, suggesting the incident at Sherlock’s flat.

“That’s quite a coincidence.”

Lestrade laughs roughly. “You don’t know the half of it.” When John raises an eyebrow, he goes on. “It wasn’t just the same day. When the M.E. came back with an estimate on Richard Brook’s time of death, she placed the window at the exact time Mrs. Hudson was shot.”

“You don’t think it’s a coincidence at all.”

Lestrade inclines his head. “I can’t prove it, but no, I don’t. I’ve tried telling them, but I’m finished over there, or near enough.” He smiles grimly. “Nobody’s going to listen to me anymore.”

It takes John a moment to absorb this. So two people, both closely involved with Sherlock, were shot at approximately the same time, shortly after which Sherlock was discovered in the throes of an overdose, apparently the result of attempted suicide. “What do you think it means?”

“Hell if I know.” Lestrade blows out a breath that is almost a laugh. “If this were any other case, I’d be asking Sherlock that question.”

“Do they have any idea who shot his landlady?”

Lestrade shakes his head. “They’re investigating, but there’s not much to go on. All they know for sure is that the shot came from high-caliber weapon fired at a long distance.”

“Professional work.”

“Funny kind of doctor, you are,” Lestrade says.

John can’t help smiling. “That’s true enough.”

“What’s your angle in all this?” Lestrade asks. “I mean, really.”

“Honestly?” John shrugs. “I don’t know. It’s none of my business, I realize that. But I can’t help feeling . . .” He shakes his head, helpless to explain, and all too aware that if he _could_ articulate the wild reckless desire Sherlock wakes in him, he’d sound just as certifiable as some of his patients. “I think I’m just trying to understand.”

Lestrade lets out a slow breath. “Yeah,” he says. “Good luck with that.”

In the silence that follows, John checks his watch. If he doesn’t hurry, he’s going to be late for his shift. “Well, I— Thanks, really, for your time, but I’ve got to be—” He gestures to the door, starts to get up.

“Listen,” Lestrade says, and John stops in place. “I don’t know what you’re looking for, but, whatever it is, I hope you find it.”

John thanks him and shows himself out.

*

Back on the high street, John catches the bus and slides into a seat by the window.

The day is winding down, the sun turning the edges of the houses gold and casting the trees into blue shadow. The streets are clogged with people on their way home from work, their days ending as John’s is just beginning. He feels so far outside this sort of normal life, farther even than he did in the middle of the desert. Then, at least, it was still a possibility, if only a distant one. Now he can’t imagine his way into this life at all.

But what’s the alternative? For better or for worse, he seems to have thrown his lot in with Sherlock, but what can that possibly mean? More sordid assignations on the hospital roof? Even if he does somehow manage to clear Sherlock’s name – if that can even be done – what then? 

He can’t deny he wants the touch, the taste, the teeth, the breathless, reckless desire, but it’s dangerous, a flame too hot to touch. 

At heart, John is a man of principle – not without fault, but decent. He’s the sort of person who generally does the right thing. But when it comes to Sherlock, he doesn’t fully trust himself. He can feel the possibility stretching out in front of him – that he would do almost anything, believe almost anything, for this man.

It’s a terrifying prospect, but then he thinks of the fractured yearning that broke across Sherlock’s face and it seems worth the risk.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The fact that the hospital is called Rotherhithe should not be taken to mean that it's actually _in_ Rotherhithe. I'm just borrowing the name.


	6. Chapter 6

John doesn’t see Sherlock during his shift that night, or the next night, or the night after that. He’s looking, but there’s no sign of him. He realizes that if Sherlock has contrived to avoid him, he will not be found.

It should be a relief. A little distance might be just what he needs.

But instead, Sherlock’s absence only leaves him more and more restless. His mind just keeps filling up with questions, about what Sherlock is doing here, about what happened in his flat with Richard Brook and what became of his landlady, about what his mouth would taste like and—

And here he is, pacing his office like some lovesick fool, all over a man who’s made it perfectly clear he doesn’t want John’s help.

What is he doing, haunting the halls in hopes of catching sight of Sherlock? What does he hope to achieve? And what would he say, if he did manage to find him?

The problem is, all he’s got are questions, and no way of answering them. He needs a plan of action, something to _do_.

Of all the questions piling up inside his head, the only one he has any hope of answering any time soon is what happened to Sherlock’s landlady, Mrs. Hudson. That much he can work on. 

Without a first name or any other details to go on, it takes him a while to track Mrs. Hudson down to a small private hospital. When he’s quite sure it’s her – the date of her admission matches up to the day Sherlock and Richard Brook were discovered in his flat – he schedules a day off work so he can make it to visiting hours.

“I’m her nephew,” he tells the nurse at the front desk the next day. He’s surprised by how easily the lie comes out, but the nurse doesn’t seem to doubt him for a second.

She directs him to a small but comfortable room at the back of the building, where a frail-looking woman is sitting up in bed, reading what, from its cover, could either be a spy novel or a lurid romance.

“Mrs. Hudson?” he asks, rapping lightly on the doorframe.

She looks up at him over the rims of her reading glasses. Her face is translucent-pale, the skin fragile and loose on her thin frame, but the look she gives him is sharp and direct. “Yes, dear?” 

“My name’s John Watson. I’m—” He hesitates, caught. Lying to the nurse was so easy that he wonders if he ought to keep it up, but Mrs. Hudson doesn’t look to him like the kind of woman who would tolerate duplicity, so instead he says, “I’m a friend of Sherlock’s.”

For a moment, she’s silent, considering him, and John thinks, panicked, of Lestrade’s ironic smile when he asked if Sherlock had any friends. But then her expression breaks open—it’s not quite a smile, but the steely expression dissolves, replaced by something almost approving, and he finds himself handing Mrs. Hudson her dressing gown and helping her up out of bed. She’s a small woman, and he can see that her injury’s taken a lot out of her. From the way she holds herself and the bandages just visible beneath the neckline of her nightgown, he’d wager the shot that took her down could’ve nicked a lung. By all accounts, she’s very lucky to be alive, but she bears up admirably, leaning on his arm only slightly as they walk down the corridor to the small courtyard.

It’s a pleasant day, the walls of the building blocking the blustery wind but admitting the bright midday sunshine. John realizes it’s been a long time since he’s been out in the middle of the day. For the past two years, this has been the middle of the night for him, and it gives him the sense he might be asleep, dreaming this too.

When they’ve settled down on a wrought-iron bench on the sunny side of the courtyard, Mrs. Hudson says, “I think you should know, John, dear, that I’m not going to tell you any sordid secrets about Sherlock’s private life, no matter how much money you offer.” Her kindly smile is belayed by the stern look in her eyes. “And, no, I’m not interested in selling off his things.”

John’s mouth is hanging open, he’s sure. “No, I— I really am a friend.” He thinks of those lean, clever hands, the smell of Sherlock’s skin close up. “Or something like it, anyway. I’m—worried about him.”

“Well, that’s different, then, isn’t it?” She pats his arm kindly. “What is it you want to know?”

John licks his lips. The question is no easier to answer now than when Lestrade asked it. It hits him, suddenly, how very tired he is, and it seems that he’s been tired for a very long time. “I think,” John says slowly, “that I’m trying to understand what’s happened. I mean, what’s _really_ happened. It’s just, everything they’re saying about him is—” He swallows hard, floundering, and tries again. “I think someone ought to know the truth. I know I’ve got no right, I’m practically a stranger, but . . .”

Mrs. Hudson smiles, taking pity on him a little. “He’s a dear boy, Sherlock. Most people don’t understand that, but I can see you do.”

John isn’t sure he would ever think to describe Sherlock as a dear anything, but there is something – he can’t quite put his finger on what – about the other man that resonates with John, irrevocably, a bell that can’t be unstruck.

“He’s a terror, mind, what with all the shouting and crashing around in the middle of the night. He burned a hole in my floor with acid, and the things he’s done to the wallpaper—” 

“He doesn’t sound like, ah, the easiest of tenants.”

She huffs, but there’s more fondness than irritation in the sound. “No, but I couldn’t ask for a better one.”

“Did he let from you for very long?”

“Almost two years. And he got a very reasonable rate, I must say.” She nods her head. “That was our little agreement – a deal on his flat because he was such a help when Mr. Hudson got into that little spot of trouble in Florida.”

“He cleared your husband’s name?” John asks.

“Oh, no, dear,” Mrs. Hudson says, as if this is the silliest suggestion she’s ever heard. “He’s always very generous – never asks his clients for more than they can pay, always happy to barter. There was a woman once who paid him in acupuncture treatments. He said he hadn’t any need for them, suggested I use them – for my hip, you know. Of course, you couldn’t pay him enough to take a boring case. No, only the interesting ones are ever good enough for Sherlock, only the ones that really sing. I suppose that was the trouble, in the end . . .” 

“How do you mean?”

“Well, that’s how he got into so much trouble with the press, isn’t it? If he’d only contented himself with a nice, quiet murder or two . . .” Mrs. Hudson sighs heavily. “He’s so very bright, but the boredom drove him to distraction, poor thing. I think he actually enjoyed putting himself in all that danger.”

John makes a consoling noise, as if he doesn’t know exactly how tempting the promise of danger can be. 

“Honestly, I’ve never seen him so excited as when that man” – John notes that she doesn’t say his name – “was after him. After they caught him, I thought it would be over, that everything would go back to normal, but . . .” She just shrugs, as if there’s nothing more she can say about it.

“What about the all claims Richard Brook made about Sherlock to the papers?” he asks.

“That nonsense,” she says sharply, and he can see that Mrs. Hudson is not a woman he would cross lightly. “Don’t believe a word of it.”

“I don’t,” he says, and is surprised to find that it’s true, more or less. He found that exposé in _The Sun_ distasteful before he ever met Sherlock, and the more he learns about him, the harder he finds it to believe. “But out of curiosity, what makes you say that?”

She’s silent for a moment, considering John closely. “Because I met him, dear.”

“You mean, you met . . . Richard Brook?”

The look she gives him is almost pitying. “I mean Moriarty.”

John leans back, as if getting a better look at her will somehow make this easier to comprehend. “You actually met Moriarty.”

And then she tells him, as calm you please, about being kidnapped from Baker St. and strapped to an explosive vest, about Sherlock’s confrontation with him at a swimming pool (John vaguely remembers seeing a note on Sherlock’s website, something about a pool). She tells him they were only saved at the last minute by a phone call from one of Moriarty’s associates. She tells him about Moriarty’s threat to burn the heart out of Sherlock and he thinks of Sherlock’s blank, impassive expression the day John first saw him, wonders if perhaps Moriarty succeeded in the end.

Except there isn’t supposed to be any such person as James Moriarty. Sherlock Holmes is meant to have made him up.

“And you’re sure that wasn’t all, I don’t know, part of the ruse,” John says numbly. 

“You didn’t see him, dear,” she says gravely. “I did. I looked him in the eye, and, believe me, I know.”

Something in her still certainty brooks no argument. Even as he tries to find some flaw in her logic, he knows it’s a lost cause. He may not understand it yet, but he wants to believe her.

“But . . . If you’re so certain Moriarty was real, why haven’t you told anyone? Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“I’ve been in here, haven’t I? At first, I was hardly in any position to tell anyone anything, and then, well . . .”

“Well what?”

She glances out across the courtyard, studying its corners carefully. “He asked me not to.”

“Who did? Not— Sherlock?” 

She fidgets with her dressing gown, pulling it more tightly around her. “The day I woke up after, there was a note on my bedside table. It wasn’t signed, and I never saw who delivered it, but I know it was from him. He said it was imperative that I didn’t tell the police anything about the case. That was the word he used, ‘imperative’.”

“But why would Sherlock want you to hold back information that would help prove his innocence?”

Mrs. Hudson shakes her head. “I don’t know, dear. But I know Sherlock well enough to trust him.” 

John scrubs one hand over his face. This is all getting to be a bit much to take in. Moriarty is real and Sherlock is innocent, but he’s doing everything in his power to cover that fact up. Why? What purpose does it serve, Sherlock being institutionalized for crimes he didn’t commit?

And what about the shooter, the one who took Mrs. Hudson down? How does he fit into the puzzle?

“I’m sorry to bring this up,” John says, “but do you have any idea what happened to you?”

“This isn’t _Corrie_ , dear,” she says, wryly reproving. “I didn’t mysteriously lose my memory when I was shot.”

“Right, no—er, of course not,” John stammers. “I just meant, do you have any theories about what happened? Who it was, or why?”

“I can tell you this much, my days of making bitter enemies are long past. Whoever it was, they certainly weren’t interested in me.”

John felt his forehead crease. “You think this was about Sherlock.”

“Of course, dear. So do you, or you wouldn’t be here.”

“So you’re saying someone . . .” John takes a deep breath, trying to make sense of this. “Someone hired a professional hitman to shoot you in order to – what? – threaten Sherlock?”

“It’s happened before.” She says this with such equanimity that John almost wants to laugh. “There was Moriarty, obviously. And not long after that, some American brutes roughed me up to get a mobile phone off him. Poor thing does have a talent for running straight toward trouble.”

“But . . . why?” John shakes his head. “All of this, I don’t—”

“I can see that you’re concerned about Sherlock, but you won’t be doing him any favors if you go on doubting him.”

“I’m not—”

She raises her eyebrows and John is reminded, strangely, of Sherlock himself. “Why don’t you see for yourself,” she says, reaching into the pocket of her dressing gown and pulling out a small key ring, which she presses into John’s hand. “The brass one’s for the front door, and the little one is for the back. He’s upstairs, in B. Have a look around. Maybe you’ll find something that’ll help you make up your mind.”

At a loss for anything else to say, John nods. 

She pats his arm approvingly. “You know,” she says, “he wouldn’t dare admit it, but I know this business has been very hard on him. I’m glad you’re looking out for him now.”

“I’m really just . . .”

“I’ve always said he needed someone to look after him – someone on his side.”

Is that what he is? John wonders. Is he on Sherlock’s side? He’s still not sure. But he’s beginning to think he might be.


	7. Chapter 7

John’s seen plenty of images of 221 Baker St – news teams and paparazzi alike were parked outside the building for weeks during Moriarty’s court case. Shots of Sherlock stoically crossing from the black front door to a police car were a fixture of reporting on the trial.

It’s quiet when the cab drops John off, though, hardly any pedestrians out and only a few people in the cafe next door to 221. Someone’s scrawled some graffiti on the arch above the front door. Somewhere not far from here, according to Lestrade, Mrs. Hudson was shot by a sniper at nearly the same moment that Richard Brook died. Or, perhaps he should say, at the moment James Moriarty died.

John sighs, leaning back on his heels and looking up at the cool stone façade of 221. The curtains on the upstairs windows are drawn, but John can’t help imagining Sherlock standing there, looking down at him, observing intensely, as always. 

Taking the keys Mrs. Hudson gave him from his jacket pocket, John lets himself in. Before the door’s even closed behind him, he puts his cane down on something slick and unstable and he loses his footing, careening against the wall. He has to lean there for a moment, catching his breath and letting his eyes adjust to the cool, weak light of the front hall before he can make out what it was he slipped on: heaps of post piled up on the floor where it’s been dropped through the letterbox. Apparently, with Mrs. Hudson in hospital, no one’s been round to collect the post or tidy up since Sherlock was arrested. The thought makes John sad, somehow, perhaps because it makes him realize how acutely alone Sherlock is in the world: no visitors in hospital, no friends, no one even to check in on his flat while he’s away. And it occurs to John, all of a sudden like a wave welling up, that he doesn’t have anyone, either. 

He picks the post up almost out of pity – though whether for Sherlock or himself, he’s not quite sure – bowing awkwardly with his cane to gather it up and pour it on the narrow table next to the front door to 221A. Some of it spills over again onto the floor, and John can’t be bothered to bend and pick it up a second time.

With that obstacle out of the way, John follows Mrs. Hudson’s directions upstairs, his cane making a hollow sound as he lumbers up the steps. 

The police tape is still stretched across the door to Sherlock’s flat, which is standing slightly ajar. Although someone’s taken care to close it, it doesn’t hang quite right on the hinges, having been forced open – by someone’s boot, if John had to guess. It gives way easily under John’s palm, and then for a moment he just stands in the doorway, taking in the place Sherlock made his home.

It’s hard to tell whether the chaos he’s confronted with is the result of a violent struggle or a thorough ransacking. There are reams of papers scattered on the chairs and table, stacks of books tumbled down in front of the stuffed-full bookshelves. But as he ducks inside, he realizes this isn’t evidence of violence at all, just poor housekeeping. The piles of junk strewn around the flat weren’t knocked there during an altercation; they were placed there, carefully, with some sort of intentional – if imperceptible – order. Even the bullet holes in the wall behind the sofa seem to be some sort of purposeful statement – maybe (John hopes) a mercy killing of the bright yellow smiley face scrawled across the wallpaper. 

Objectively, he can see that the flat is nice, or could be: it’s cozy, if a bit run-down, all mismatched wallpaper and hazy light. But the homey potential of the flat is somewhat marred by the lingering odor of blood, which is liberally spattered across the mantel over the fireplace. He takes a half-step back in shock – not because he hasn’t seen worse (he has), but because he’d been looking at this room for the past few minutes, thinking how quaint it is, without noticing the blood and brain matter splashed on the wall. 

He doesn’t know why he expected it to have been cleaned up. If no one’s been by to pick up the mail, of course no one’s arranged to have the flat cleaned. Standing here, faced with the evidence of the crime, the question of whether to call the dead man Richard Brook or Jim Moriarty seems suddenly academic. Whoever he was, whatever he did wrong, a man died here, and died badly, by the looks of it.

He must have been standing right about where John’s standing now when the bullet exploded the back of his skull. Except, unlike John, he would have been facing into the room. He would have been facing Sherlock. And Sherlock would have been right there – the press coverage emphasized the powder burns on Sherlock’s clothes, and he must have been close for that degree of discharge. He would have fallen, probably straight down, and sure enough, there’s a dark, dense stain on the carpet in front of the fireplace.

John wonders where Sherlock was when the police found him. He looks around the living room, trying to imagine, when his eyes light on a smallish wooden box lying open on the mantel. Stepping over what’s left of Moriarty, John takes a closer look: the velvet lining of the box is gently depressed in the shape of what John recognizes as a syringe and a vial. Everything else on the mantel is generously flecked with blood, but the box isn’t. Gingerly, John lifts it up. Underneath, a pile of letters is marked with dark brown drops.

All of a sudden John’s leg doesn’t want to support him anymore and he sits down heavily in the armchair in front of the hearth. It feels like his hands should be shaking but they aren’t. He clenches his fists and then presses his palms against the tops of his thighs, smoothing the denim down along his legs.

It’s not as if John didn’t know it had happened. The details of Sherlock’s overdose were carefully detailed in the papers, reiterated in almost every article about the case. The amount of cocaine in his system had been, by all accounts, prodigious. Some industrious hack found out that Sherlock had been picked up once for possession and had done a couple of stints in rehab, which the tabloids had a field day with.

But knowing it happened is different from seeing the evidence unfold in front of him. 

Sherlock wasn’t already high when the shot went off, the way the papers speculated. He watched Moriarty die and then he went and found that box – which has the look of a treasured keepsake, almost a ritual object – and he took enough cocaine to kill a man twice his size. 

Why? That’s what John doesn’t understand. Why should Sherlock try to kill himself? Or no, not _try_. John may not know him very well, but Sherlock doesn’t strike him one to do things by half. He intended a lethal dose, and it would have been, if the police had come a minute later. What could he possibly have accomplished by committing suicide? 

The papers speculated that Sherlock killed Richard Brook for exposing him as a fake. Even if Brook was actually Moriarty, that line of reasoning could still hold – John can see why Sherlock would kill Moriarty for framing him. He might not approve, but he can understand it. But killing Moriarty and then himself, that doesn’t make any sense. Sherlock was clever enough that he could have made Moriarty’s death look like suicide, or claimed self-defense. Hell, he probably knew a dozen ways to make that body disappear without a trace. That’s what a true criminal mastermind would do. 

John thinks of what Mrs. Hudson said, about how excited Sherlock had been when Moriarty first came on the scene, and feels suddenly sick. He can’t stand to be in the sitting room anymore, staring at some poor bastard’s grey matter dried to the walls. He pushes up out of the armchair and stumbles into the kitchen, past a worktop cluttered with scientific equipment and the fridge, which, even closed, smells of spoiled food. Through the kitchen is a bedroom, and John collapses unthinking onto the neatly made bed.

He can’t breathe properly, his chest tight, his stomach roiling as the enormity of what he’s gotten himself into crashes down on him. This is the man he’s been spending time with, the man he’s been thinking about trying to exonerate, the man whose hands he can still feel burning hot on his skin. 

“I can’t,” he says aloud. “I can’t, I can’t.”

Mrs. Hudson believes in Sherlock unequivocally, and Greg Lestrade trusts him despite everything that’s happened, and the mysterious man with the umbrella is invested in proving his innocence, but John simply doesn’t know what to believe. The newspaper reports, the blood spatter on the walls, even Sherlock himself seem to urge John to accept that Sherlock is a heartless killer. But some invisible thread inside his chest keeps pulling John in the opposite direction. He keeps thinking of the look on Sherlock’s face when John said he didn’t believe he was past redemption, that raw, open ache.

 _Never theorize before you have all the evidence_ , he’d said.

That’s what all of this – his interviews with Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade, coming here to Baker St. – is supposed to be about: gathering evidence. But John can’t seem to make the pieces fit together. The more he learns, the more irreconcilable the facts become. Each time he seems to find something to hold onto, some interpretation that makes sense, it slips away from him in the face of new information.

John takes a deep breath, breathes out, then does it again. 

He doesn’t have to draw any conclusions yet. The ache that’s been coalescing in his own chest since the first moment he saw Sherlock can wait a little while longer, until he has all the facts. And then, maybe, he’ll be able to name that sensation. And maybe – although he hardly dares to think it – he’ll be able to do something about it.

He’s sweating, he realizes absently, and there’s a sour taste in his mouth. He peels off his jacket and limps into the bathroom for a drink of water. Leaning his cane on the sink, he cups his hands and drinks from the tap, mouthful after mouthful of ice-cold water. He splashes some on his face, scrubs his chilled, wet hands through his hair, the sharp shock centering him.

John has to be at work in a little less than an hour, but before he leaves, he has a look round the rest of the flat. Up another flight of stairs – which John’s leg complies with only resentfully – is the second bedroom, even emptier than the one downstairs. There are no sheets on this mattress, no clothes in the closet. So the room downstairs is definitely Sherlock’s.

Curious, John returns to Sherlock’s bedroom and lets himself look around. The room is conspicuously tidy, sparsely appointed. A framed period table of elements over the bed is one of the only personal items on display. In the closet, dark, carefully cut suits hang above a neat row of shoes.

Before he leaves the room, he stops to smooth out the wrinkles he left on the bed. In his panic earlier, he hadn’t noticed how soft the sheets are. They must be expensive. They still smell faintly of sweat, of sleep. It wasn’t that long ago that Sherlock was a free man, living here in this flat, sleeping in this bed. John breathes deep of that scent, holds it in his lungs. 

He wonders what it was Mrs. Hudson wanted him to see when she gave him the keys to Baker St. Surely she didn’t hope he would find the blood dispersed across the sitting room wall. 

Did she anticipate that he would sit on this bed and breathe in the closeness of Sherlock’s skin? That sitting here among Sherlock’s belongings would feel so incredibly intimate? Here Sherlock seems like neither the monstrous genius the papers have made him out to be, nor the enigmatic ghost of a man John’s encountered on the ward. Here he is exactly nothing more or less than a man – someone who sleeps and cleans his teeth and sometimes crushes the heels of his shoes in his haste to get them on. He still has plenty of questions about Sherlock, but the only way to answer them is by piecing together the little details of his life, bit by bit, until the whole picture forms. What that final picture will be – whether it’s a condemnation or an alibi – John still doesn’t know for sure, but for the first time he can see how he might arrive at that result.

The last thing John does before leaving 221B is to pull out his mobile and dial Greg Lestrade’s number. “I need a favor,” he says when Lestrade picks up.

“Who’s this?” The man sounds like he’s just woken up, and John feels a twinge of guilt, though not much.

“John Watson. I’d like to see the files for all the cases Sherlock is meant to have faked.”

There’s nothing but silence on the other end of the line, and John begins to think that maybe his mobile’s dropped the call. “Hello?”

“No, no, I’m here, I just— You can’t seriously be trying to do what I think you’re doing.”

“That depends on what you think I’m trying to do.”

“It’s mad. You know that, right?”

“Yeah,” John says calmly. “I know.”

“OK.” Lestrade says it slowly, clearly just humoring him. “But you know I’ve been chucked out. I don’t have access to any of that information any more. Even if I did think you’d find anything conclusive – and I’m not saying you would – what do you want me to do about it?”

John smiles. “I’m sure you’ll think of something.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Small shout-out to Eldritch Horrors' "[The Cold Song](http://archiveofourown.org/series/10025)" in the form of Sherlock's box.
> 
> I've done my best to be accurate here about crime scene protocol and cleanup, but I've also bent some facts for the sake of the story. Most likely, the box would have been taken into evidence, but John needed to find it, so. As always, any factual critique is much welcome.


	8. Chapter 8

It’s not until he arrives at the hospital that it occurs to him to wonder what he’s going to say to Sherlock if they cross paths. 

Sherlock was fairly insistent that John should give up on him, that he didn’t even deserve any help – from John or anyone else. Will he tell Sherlock he’s still pursuing the matter, despite Sherlock’s wishes? Will he press him again for an explanation? And if he does, what will Sherlock do in return? Will he lash out at John—or draw him close?

He’s still vibrating from his visit to Baker St. earlier in the evening, and he’s on the look out for Sherlock all night, his whole body seemingly on high alert. He can feel the stagnant air of his office on every inch of his skin, and every sound outside his door is magnified, wide, transmuted into possible footfall or an announcing inhalation of breath.

The hours pass. John walks down to the nurses station. He files last night’s paperwork. He strolls through the rec room, passes the cafeteria twice. He checks his mobile to see whether Lestrade has called. He checks it again.

John’s almost given up hope of seeing Sherlock tonight when, in the last hours of his shift, as dawn is rising outside the windows, he gets up to stretch his leg, which is aching again, and turns a blind corner to find Sherlock standing at the window at the end of the hall, stubbing out a cigarette.

Whatever John had planned to say dries up instantly at the sight of the long white column of Sherlock’s neck, and when those articulate fingers flick the cigarette out the window, heat rushes unbidden to John’s face.

A smug smile curls Sherlock’s lips when he spots the color on John’s cheeks. “Evening, Dr. Watson,” he drawls.

For a moment, John considers turning on his heel and making a strategic retreat. But even if his legs weren’t locking up, he knows he wouldn’t leave. He’s come too far to back down now. He can’t.

“You really shouldn’t,” he says, meaning the cigarette, the lighter. 

It seems that Sherlock was expecting him to run off, too, because when John stands his ground, the smile slips from his face. “Talking of ill-advised decisions . . . Come back for a repeat performance?”

John swallows. He can’t say the thought doesn’t have some merit, but this isn’t about what John wants. “That’s not going to happen again.”

This seems, paradoxically, to restore some of Sherlock’s confidence. “No?” John can see his tongue move stealthily behind his teeth, the gesture of an avid gambler calculating odds. “Because judging by your pupillary response and the pattern of your breathing, I’d say you’re very interested in having another go.”

The way he crowds close to John is supposed to be seductive – and, God, the smell of his skin is hard to resist – but to John it feels more like intimidation than a lover’s intimacy. Sherlock uses every inch of his lean height to urge John backwards, to get him exactly where he wants him. They’re in a blind spot here, just outside the watchful scope of the security cameras. Sherlock is well aware of this, has chosen this spot carefully, because it means he can do whatever he wants. The thought sends a thrill straight down to John’s gut and he thinks, _No, this isn’t how this was supposed to happen._

Sherlock reaches out to take John’s wrist – John’s pulse twists – but then he stops, breathing deeply. His eyes go wide and he inhales again before his expression turns dangerously blank.

“What do you think you’re doing?” Sherlock asks, his voice sharp.

“What?” John takes a step back, only to find his shoulders against the wall.

“What,” Sherlock says slowly, each word a knife, “were you doing in my flat?”

“How—?”

“Don’t try to deny it,” Sherlock snaps. “I can smell it on you.” He presses his forearm across John’s throat, his touch no longer a temptation but a threat. “Who sent you? Who are you working for?”

“Sent me? What? No— Nobody sent me.” The pressure on his windpipe increases. “Mrs. Hudson gave me the keys.”

Sherlock goes absolutely still, though his hold on John’s throat doesn’t relax. “Explain.”

“I wanted to talk to someone,” John chokes out, “someone who knew you, who might be able to—” He can feel his pulse hammering under Sherlock’s arm, and takes a little sip of breath, trying to calm himself. “She gave me the keys, told me to have a look around. I think she thought it might help me understand—”

Sherlock snarls, shoving John so hard that his head cracks against the wall. 

“It’s not nice, is it,” John says, “when other people know things about you.”

“Oh, so you think you know something about me because you spent twenty minutes rooting around in my sock drawer, is that it?” Sherlock’s face is so close that his sharp breath touches John’s cheek. His colorless eyes are fierce, full of rage. “This should be good. All right, go ahead. Tell me. What is it you _know_ about me?”

John doesn’t flinch or look away, just meets Sherlock’s gaze evenly. “I’m just trying to get to the truth—”

“The truth?” He spits the word like poison. “You know the truth, John, you and every single person who reads _The Sun_.”

“You can’t seriously be saying . . .” The words die on John’s lips. Sherlock is completely serious, he realizes. He means every word.

His gaze is unremitting. “Even if it didn’t happen, it’s still true.”

“Is that you admitting it didn’t happen, then?”

“It doesn’t matter if it did,” Sherlock grinds out. “What matters is that they believe it, and you should, too.”

John’s throat works for a moment before he can speak. “If you’re trying to frighten me off, it won’t work.”

Sherlock leans back, his expression calculating. “No,” he says, suddenly calm. “It won’t, will it? I thought compromising your medical ethics with a little illicit tryst on the rooftop would be enough to keep you out of my way, but obviously I underestimated you.”

“Is that what that was?” John asks. 

Sherlock laughs, a nasty, taunting sound. “You didn’t honestly think I wanted you?” He turns his head, huffing out another derisive gust of laughter. “I don’t feel that way, didn’t you know?” He drops his hands from John’s lapels as if John is suddenly repulsive to him. “I don’t feel anything.” 

“No?” John’s anger crystallizes suddenly, a hot weight under his ribs. “What about Mrs. Hudson? Did you feel anything when she was shot in the chest?”

Sherlock’s hand flies up to hit John, but it’s wild, unintentioned, hardly a careful strike, and John grabs his arm, flipping their positions and shoving him so hard against the wall that the windowpanes shake in their frames. Sherlock looks down at him with dark eyes, so stunned he doesn’t even struggle in John’s grip. 

“Now it’s your turn to listen to me,” John says, leaning up on his toes so that they’re almost eye to eye, their chests, hips, thighs aligned and almost touching. “You’re not going to intimidate me away from you.” Sherlock’s chest heaves, shuddering. “And don’t think for a second that I believe that you don’t feel. You may not give a damn about me, and that’s fine – I don’t matter – but don’t pretend that you don’t care about your own life.”

Now Sherlock is the one who’s having trouble breathing, and John feels Sherlock rise up under him, pressing against him, trying to throw him off, but John holds him firm. He has the look of a trapped creature, desperate for escape. “Don’t,” he says, his voice rough, fracturing. “Don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m on the side of the angels.”

The words have the air of a recitation, almost of Bible verse, and they send a chill over John’s skin.

“No.” John shakes his head. “That’s true, you’re not.” He laughs a little, lightly. “But you’re not what you’ve let all the others believe you are, either. You’re not that. Maybe you’ve been lying to everyone so long that you believe it, too, but I don’t. Are we clear?”

Sherlock doesn’t nod, but he lets his eyes meet John’s for a long, breathless moment, and that’s enough of a sign of assent. John lets Sherlock go and steps back, straightening his jacket on his shoulders before he turns to leave, his cane loud in the sudden silence left between them.

“John.”

At the sound of his name, John looks back to find Sherlock staring at him, his eyes dark, shoulders moving with the uneven pattern of his breath. “This won’t end well for you.”

John nods. “I know.”

*

It’s not until John is safely home and lying in bed that he lets himself think about his altercation with Sherlock. Staring up at the shadow-crossed ceiling, he tries to parse what’s passed between them.

Sherlock anger upon discovering that John had been to his flat was electric, but it was fury at being exposed, vulnerable. What John said struck a nerve, however deeply Sherlock tried to keep it buried. He can play the heartless mastermind all he wants, but what Mrs. Hudson said is true: he’s hurting, reeling like an injured animal – and, like any injured creature, he’s liable to act unpredictably, lashing out against anyone who comes close.

There was a time when Sherlock’s anger would have stopped John. He might, once, have turned back, taking Sherlock at his word and leaving him to his own devices. But that time, John knows, is long past. For better or for worse, he’s been tied to Sherlock since the moment he first laid eyes on him, and now it’s just a matter of following through.

John can’t help wondering what would have happened if he’d met Sherlock while he was still a free man – as a client, maybe, or as one of the string of flatmates Lestrade said never stayed long. John can’t pretend that he would have been able to stop what’s happened – _you won’t fix me or solve me or save me_ , he said – but he can’t help wondering whether things mightn’t have been, at least, different.

In Sherlock, John recognizes another soul thrown out of joint. He knows that that’s like, to be careening along on your intended course when something comes out of the blue and knocks you entirely out of your familiar orbit. That’s what’s happening to Sherlock, withdrawing into himself in this maximum security ward. But no matter what he’s done, this is not where he belongs. John knows, because he’s been out of place, too, ever since he left Afghanistan, and ever since then he’s been trying, failing, to find some new direction for himself. Now, it seems, John has finally found some other orbit, one where Sherlock Holmes is the pole star, the only light John can seem to make out clearly anymore.

He’s not going to stop, not now. For better or for worse, he’s got to see this through to the end, to the truth, no matter what the cost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> "Even if it didn't happen, it's still true" is a paraphrase of a line from Ken Kesey's _One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest_ , although I think it's probably me, not Sherlock, who's making that reference.


	9. Chapter 9

John isn’t idle while he waits for Lestrade to come through with Sherlock’s case files. Because the thing is, proving Sherlock innocent is only half the problem. If he really wants to set things to rights, he’s going to have to prove that Moriarty is guilty, too.

The most logical place to start is in the same place this whole bloody mess started: with Kitty Riley’s expose in _The Sun_. He’s read the article so many times by now that all the details are starting to run together, but if he’s going to take Moriarty’s story apart, he’s going to need all the ammunition he can get.

John pulls up the article and sits staring at the screen, hoping that some damning detail will volunteer itself. Under the bold headline – “SHERLOCK’S A FAKE!” – is an unflattering photo of Sherlock, catching him no doubt in the middle of some brilliant disquisition on the facts of a case. From there, Kitty Riley’s breathless prose unravels Richard Brook’s story, by now so hatefully familiar to John. The text wraps around a sidebar featuring a small black-and-white headshot of Brook and a brief summary of his paltry television career.

A quick search on IMDB corroborates the credits listed there – a short stint as a doctor on one of those awful hospital soaps and one series of a children’s program called _The Storyteller_. John remembers watching a clip of _The Storyteller_ on YouTube during his initial fact-finding mission – something about a boastful knight, nothing too riveting, but, then, John’s not exactly the target audience. Actually, now that he thinks of it, Richard Brook makes something of a sinister children’s presenter, although that might just be hindsight.

Under Brook’s picture is a photo credit, which John hadn’t noticed until now: Arwel Jones, the Mountford Agency.

Google tells him that the Mountford Agency is a small talent agency handling bookings for film, television and stage actors in the London area. So far, it seems respectable enough, but when John calls the number listed on their website, the phone just rings and rings. And according to Google Maps, the company’s address is a private residence in Forest Hill.

John sits back, considering. It’s possible that the agency could simply have gone out of business. But wouldn’t they have taken down their website and disconnected their phone? And what sort of legitimate talent company would be based out of a private residence?

But if the Mountford Agency isn’t legitimate, then what?

Could it be that the Mountford Agency was set up for the express purpose of representing Richard Brook? It seems absurd to even consider such a thing, but this whole tangled business is full of over-the-top theatrics and implausible circumstances. If people are going to accept that Sherlock invented James Moriarty, isn’t it just as likely that James Moriarty invented Richard Brook?

Googling Richard Brook himself is problematic. There are plenty of search results, but most of them were written _after_ the article in _The Sun_ appeared, and they all repeat the same stock details. Curiously, the same is true of searching for James Moriarty: lots of hits about his crimes and his trial, but almost nothing predating that.

John knows this is the way journalism works, that boilerplate information often gets recycled for the sake of quick content, but even so, it’s strange. Even if you’re careful, it’s almost impossible not to turn up on the internet one way or another. Searching for ‘John H. Watson’ turns up a donor list for a charity he gave money to seven or eight years ago, and he still hasn’t been able to scrub away all the evidence of the painfully dull blog his therapist suggested he start when he first got back from Afghanistan. So it seems odd that the only information about Richard Brook is information that he wanted to put out there.

John wonders how a person would go about falsifying an entire life. It can’t be impossible – identity fraud happens all the time, after all, but stealing someone’s credit cards is a bit different than trumping up all the little details that make up the average person’s life. He imagines that even the most dedicated forger would want to focus on the most important details – CV, previous addresses, credit history. Sketching out the trivialities like Amazon book reviews and unflattering photos tagged by inconsiderate Facebook friends would entail, he suspects, a bit too much work to be truly worthwhile.

It seems like such an extensive lie, to invent someone out of whole cloth, but John supposes that if anyone were going to do it, it would be the man who managed to break into the Tower of London, Bank of England, and Pentonville simultaneously.

And, come to think of it, how could he possibly manage all that? The man would have to be massively connected. John can’t even imagine the number of palms that had to be greased, the number of blind eyes turned. It seems incredible that not one of them surfaced during Moriarty’s trial. But, then, if he had the influence to commit such a complex series of crimes, who’s to say he couldn’t silence some witnesses, too? 

If Richard Brook is a lie, he’s an impressively convincing one. And it’s not just the TV credits and the headshots – it’s the level of detail in his story itself, all the things he knew about Sherlock, all the odd, intimate details he toted out and held up for everyone to see.

The details of Kitty Riley’s expose present a grim little sketch, full of social isolation and vicious altercations with his peers, obsessive focus and passionate intensity in all pursuits. But the picture that resolves from those remembrances is not that of a remorseless sociopath, as Riley seems to conclude, but rather of a lonely, misunderstood boy too clever for his own good.

It really is an ugly piece. Even before he knew Sherlock, he found it hateful. Anybody’s life could look damning on paper, and John knows that Sherlock, especially, is so much greater than the sum of his parts. 

But whether or not he agrees with the assessment Richard Brook made, the fact remains that he knew things about Sherlock. Some of it is a matter of public record or can easily be found on Sherlock’s Wikipedia page – what schools he went to, for instance, or where he was born – but other details are more obscure, information only someone who’d known him since childhood would remember. If that information didn’t come from Richard Brook, it had to have come from somewhere.

These stories certainly aren’t the sort of thing you’d just tell a mate – if Sherlock ever had any mates to tell. Some of the anecdotes are excruciating, truly dehumanizing sleights perpetrated with casual cruelty. None of it’s outside the realm of possibility – kids are monsters to one another, after all – but it’s not likely to come up in casual conversation. Not even a sociopath says fondly, “Remember the time I slipped ipecac to that prefect who’d been harassing me?” No, these are the sorts of situations one witnesses first-hand.

Which would mean that Moriarty’s source, whoever it was, was more than just a lifelong friend – he would have to have lived his life in parallel to Sherlock, going to all the same schools, running in the same circles. 

Someone, it occurs to John, like a brother. 

He wonders how he could go about getting ahold of Sherlock’s brother Mycroft. And he wonders whether, even if he could find Mycroft, it would actually him any closer to exonerating Sherlock.

But there might be someone else who’d be able to comment on Richard Brook’s not-so-rosy schooldays reminiscences. At least, John can find out whether anyone from that time remembers him, and whether these stories have any truth behind them.

Googling the name of Sherlock’s primary school – a posh boys’ school in Sussex – quickly turns up the school’s contact information, but when he calls asking after alumni lists for Sherlock’s graduating class, he’s met with a cold refusal.

He realizes his mistake even before the receptionist finishes saying no. Schools can’t just go around giving out the names of their students, after all. If he’d been thinking, he would have invented some sort of excuse that entitled him to the information. Certainly it’s what Sherlock would have done, probably with absolute fluency and so hesitation whatsoever.

When he calls Sherlock’s secondary schools – including the one from which he was sent down for starting a fire, and the one where he poisoned the prefect – he tries passing himself off as an old boy trying to reconnect with some friends. This still doesn’t net him a comprehensive list, but the woman on the phone does give him the contact information for the alumni representative for Sherlock’s class, Victor Trevor.

After he hangs up, he hesitates a moment, staring down at the scrap of paper on which Trevor’s email is written. There’s no doubt that he’s going to contact Victor Trevor. The only question is how.

Flexing his fingers, he opens his email, types out a message. He deletes this version and tries three more before settling on:

> Dear Mr. Trevor,
> 
> You don’t know me, but I’m a friend of Sherlock Holmes. I know that you two were at school together, and I was hoping you’d be able to corroborate a few details about that period of time, or point me in the direction of someone who could.
> 
> Thanks very much,

After another moment’s hesitation, he signs the email:

> John Watson, MB BS  
>  Rotherhithe Hospital

Reading it over, it sounds terribly insufficient, but it’s the best he can do. He’s tempted to say more, to explain himself, but there’s no guarantee that the subject of Sherlock Holmes won’t rile Victor Trevor up. For all John knows, Trevor could be the prefect Sherlock slipped emetic, or one of the boys who called Sherlock a freak and worse in the corridors ( _The Sun_ offered no specific details on this point, but that doesn’t make John any less certain it happened).

He hits send. Now there’s nothing to do but wait and see if Trevor replies.

Sighing, John scrubs at his eyes. It’s already past noon and he’ll need to start getting ready for his shift in a few hours. There’s no way he’s going to make solve this all at once, and he can’t do much more until he hears back from either Lestrade or Victor Trevor. He might as well have a cup of tea and turn in for the day. 

As he sets the kettle to boil, he tries to work out how long it’s been since he first saw Sherlock, but he can’t remember. It seems as if he’s always known him. It’s unreal, but that’s how deeply Sherlock’s managed to get under his skin. 

He runs his fingertips idly over his lips, thinking back to how close they were in the hallway the last time he saw Sherlock. He ought to put it out of his mind. Sherlock told him it didn’t mean anything, that he was just trying to compromise John. And yet, he can’t stop thinking how, if he’d just leaned in a little closer, he could have reached out and licked Sherlock’s teeth.

Just as he’s finished fixing his tea, there’s a knock on his door. He opens it to find a pretty but unhappy-looking black woman holding a cardboard box out in front of herself like an incendiary device.

“John Watson?” she asks. 

He nods. “Yes?”

“Detective Inspector Donovan.” He recognizes her voice now, vaguely, from the day he called New Scotland Yard. “Greg Lestrade sent me. Though I really don’t know why I agreed.” She thrusts the box toward him and he takes it from her, surprised by its weight only for a moment. When he turns around from putting the box down on the coffee table, she’s followed him inside. He thinks about offering her a cup of tea, decides not to. 

For a long moment, they stand there in silence, observing his impersonal living room. “I don’t know what you said to convince Greg this was a good idea,” she says, “but I promise you, you’re going to be disappointed.”

“Nobody’s twisting your arm,” he points out.

She scowls down at the box she’s delivered. “I’m not doing this for Sherlock Holmes. And if you’re smart, you won’t do it, either.”

John laughs. “Funny, he said the same thing.”

She gives him a curious look out of the corner of her eye. “Maybe you should listen.”

“Did you work with him?”

“Who, Holmes?” She lets out a sharp breath. “Yeah.”

“Not a big supporter, I take it.”

She opens her mouth to say something, then seems to think better of it, shaking her head. “Just—don’t get your hopes up.”

John doesn’t tell her it’s much too late for that.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Obviously, Arwel Jones is not a fictional character, but his name is credited under the photo on Richard Brook's CV in _TRF_. I briefly considered having John track him down, but I decided I didn't want to go that meta.
> 
> I swapped Victor Trevor from a university friend to secondary school because Sebastian Wilkes can cover the latter era.
> 
> We're now entering the 'bad detective' portion of this narrative, in which my sleuthing skills cannot hope to stand up to the standards set by the show. Hopefully, we can excuse this by saying John hasn't quite mastered the art of detection yet. Any critique or comments on this aspect (or any other) is much welcome.


	10. Chapter 10

John takes the case files Lestrade had smuggled out for him over to Baker St., reasoning that it’ll be easier to find ways to corroborate Sherlock’s movements if he has direct access to all of Sherlock’s records. At least, he presumes there must be records somewhere in the chaos of loose papers and Petri dishes scattered around the flat. Besides, it’s a shorter commute to the hospital from Baker St., and he doesn’t think Mrs. Hudson would mind. As for what Sherlock would think, well, they’ve already established this can’t end well for John, so he might as well go all in.

But before he can make any progress on the case files, the first order of business is to tidy the flat up a bit. He buys a paint scraper and some industrial-strength cleaning solvent and spends his day off scraping brain matter off the sitting room wall. He rolls up the bloodstained rug and drags it down the back stairs to put it out with the rubbish. Once he gets started, it’s hard to stop. There’s not much he can do about the bullet holes in the wall without further supplies, but that smarmy little smiley face is actually starting to grow on him.

After he’s cleared up the worst of the damage in the parlor, he tidies the kitchen and cleans out the fridge, in the course of which he finds very little food, though there are several truly dangerous looking mold samples in the crisper, and most of a calf’s brain in the freezer. 

As he’s rinsing down the refrigerator shelves, it occurs to him that, by all rights, Sherlock’s power probably shouldn’t even be on. No one’s come round to clean up the flat or even to pick up the post, but all the utilities are still running. It’s been months since Sherlock and Mrs. Hudson have been at home to pay the bills. It’s possible one or the other of them arranged to pay them automatically, but he can hardly see Sherlock worrying about the gas board, let alone planning ahead. 

Leaving the refrigerator shelves to soak – really, he doesn’t want to know what’s crusted on there – John treads carefully down the stairs and thumbs through the letters he piled up on the little table in the front hall during his first visit to Baker St.

From the looks of things, the bills have still been coming regularly, and the few he opens – he has a moment’s guilt, but reminds himself that Sherlock would have no such compunctions – show no sign of an overdue balance. 

Could someone be paying Sherlock’s bills? Or perhaps it’s nothing, and Mrs. Hudson is just a responsible landlady and arranged for the bills to be debited from her account. It’s just one more mystery to throw onto the ever-growing pile.

Climbing back upstairs, John returns to find the refrigerator considerably more amenable to scrubbing.

After he finishes with the kitchen, he starts sorting the heaps of papers and junk piled up in the front room. At first, it’s just to make space so he can spread out and work, but the cleaner the flat gets, the nicer it looks. He opens the windows to air out the smell of Dettol and dried blood, and with the late afternoon sunlight streaming in, the flat almost seems like a place someone could call home.

Once the flat is habitable again, John starts to go through Sherlock’s case files. Reading the official records of events carries with it a certain out-of-body strangeness. He’s read all the newspaper coverage of the cases he can find, of course, but this is something else entirely. These are first-hand accounts written by people who were on-scene (Lestrade’s name appears a number of times, as does then-DS Donovan’s). They should seem intimate, but the impartial, professional language of the reports creates a distance, a false sense of objectivity. 

Even at a remove, though, John can make out the workings of Sherlock’s incredible mind, the leaps and bounds he’s made to reach his conclusions. It’s not difficult to see how someone might doubt he’d really worked these cases out all on his own, and yet, the more John reads, the more he doubts that Sherlock could ever invent such an elaborate smokescreen. It’s not that he’s incapable of it – obviously he’s more than clever enough to pull it off, and he clearly has no scruples about deceit – but John can’t help thinking that this kind of facade would be an affront to the pure logic he prizes above all else. What Sherlock loves – and it shows through clearly even in the blandest of the police reports – is solving inscrutable puzzles, and John can’t believe that solving a puzzle he’d set himself would satisfy Sherlock in the least.

John finds himself wishing he could have seen Sherlock solve one of these crimes in person. His own encounters with the man have been mild by comparison. He’d like to witness the wild contortions of that great mind, to see the flare of Sherlock’s expression as he finally, finally puts it all together. It must be a sight to behold. 

But he’s not here just to admire Sherlock’s method. Using the police reports as a guide, John attempts to piece together the events on the day Moriarty died. After Sherlock escaped police custody, he went missing for several hours. At some point during that time, according to a separate police report, Kitty Riley claimed that Sherlock broke into her flat to threaten Richard Brook before both men disappeared into the night. The police were watching Sherlock’s flat, hoping he might return. 

Nobody saw Moriarty approach Baker St. on the following day, nor did anyone notice Sherlock, either, until the officer assigned to keep an eye on 221 – Donovan, as it happens – heard a single gunshot. By the time she broke down the door and ran inside, Sherlock was in the throes of what would have been a fatal cocaine overdose. The crime scene photos replicate the aftermath in high resolution.

All of this seems to corroborate the official story – that Sherlock shot Brook and then tried to kill himself. 

But if Sherlock did shoot him in an attempt to make it look like suicide, why choose to put the gun in his mouth? Surely he’d pick the temple, not the mouth, where he’d have to get Moriarty’s lips open to accept the barrel. If he’d forced his mouth open, there would have been bruising, abrasions—something. The coroner’s report doesn’t mention any defensive wounds, no signs of a struggle that would indicate Sherlock coerced him. 

He flips to the photos of Moriarty’s body again, then back to the coroner’s findings. John’s no forensic expert, but there’s something wrong here. The gun had to have gone into his mouth upside-down, the trigger just against his philtrum, with the bullet exiting up out of his skull toward the top of his parietal. But someone standing across from him would’ve held the gun with the trigger down, against his lower lip, and the bullet would have come out lower on his skull, more toward the occipital. It would be difficult – awkward, but not impossible – for someone standing opposite him to have pulled the trigger any other way. In order to achieve this angle, Sherlock would either have had to twist his arm across his body, or switch his grip on the gun. 

It just doesn’t make sense.

And yet, Sherlock never said one word in his defense – in fact, he actively discouraged Mrs. Hudson from defending him. Why? Why, when it should have been so obvious that he wasn’t responsible for Moriarty’s death?

He thinks of what Sherlock said to him that night on the roof – _I think you’ll find I’m exactly where I’m meant to be_. Could it be that he threw his case on purpose, that he _wanted_ to end up in hospital? 

But, again, why? Why would Sherlock willingly sabotage his life that way? The tabloids would say it was guilt over the crimes he commissioned, but John knows better. The kind of man who could commission such a large-scale deception wouldn’t suddenly catch a conscience. 

Questions and more questions and never any answers.

Sighing, John pushes himself out of his chair and limps into the kitchen to see if there’s any tea to be had. Sure enough, in one of the cabinets, behind a stand of pipettes, is a box of stale PG Tips. There’s no milk, and he’s not sure he trusts the sugar given the state he found the kitchen in, but it’ll have to do.

While the kettle boils, John makes a half-hearted attempt to organize the cabinets, sequestering the chemistry equipment on one side and the foodstuffs on another. In what John takes to be a cutlery drawer, he finds be an envelope full of breadcrumbs, which spill all over when he picks it up without realizing it’s already been slit open. 

He’s looking for some kind of dustpan or broom to sweep the crumbs up with when he notices a mobile phone charger plugged into one of the outlets by the counter. There’s no phone plugged in, though – Sherlock probably had him with it when he was taken into custody.

Abandoning his search for the dustpan, John goes back to the files Donovan brought over, pages through until he finds the manifest of all the possessions the police took off him when he was arrested: billfold – empty of cash, although he had almost ten pounds in coins on him – wristwatch, Oyster card registered to Kitty Riley, lockpick set, magnifying glass, two pair of nitrile gloves and an empty evidence bag . . . But no mobile.

In the kitchen, the kettle clicks off, but John is already on his way to the bedroom. Most people would keep their mobile on the bedside table or maybe the dresser, but there’s no evidence of Sherlock’s phone there, and Sherlock is hardly ‘most people.’ 

Back in the living room, he finds a drawer full of mobile phones, including one very posh-looking item with what looks like real gold trim, but none of them fit the charger in the kitchen.

It’s strange. These days, most people live on their phones, and there’s no evidence Sherlock had a landline, so where’s his mobile? John supposes he could have lost it somewhere, but someone careful like Sherlock, it doesn’t seem likely.

Pulling out his own phone, he dials Scotland Yard and asks for Donovan. It’s late, he realizes, but he might just catch her.

“Donovan,” she says when she picks up.

“Did you find a mobile in Sherlock’s flat?”

“What are you doing calling here?” Her voice is sharp. “You can’t just ring me up asking about – about _him_.”

“He didn’t have it on him when you arrested him, so where was it? In the flat somewhere?”

“You really think he’s innocent, don’t you?”

“And you don’t,” John replies. “And yet, you’re helping me.”

“Not for his sake.” Her voice is flat.

“For who, then?”

She’s quiet for a moment. John imagines her getting up, closing the door to her office. “Greg Lestrade didn’t deserve to be chucked out. He made an error in judgment, yeah, but we all did. Every one of us believed the lies that freak told us. It’s not his fault he was taken in.”

“And if he wasn’t taken in after all?”

“You don’t know him. Maybe you think you do, but you don’t, not really.”

“And you do?” John asks, challenging.

He can almost hear Donovan’s jaw clench. “I was the one who found him,” she says. John knew this from the police report, but somehow hearing her say it aloud is different. “He was standing by the window.” She takes a short breath, lets it out. “He was practically vibrating off the floor he was so high. And d’you know what he said to me?”

John is silent.

“When he turned around and saw me, he started laughing. He said, ‘It’s my fault. I lost the game.’ He tried to convince me not to call an ambulance.”

John feels cold all over, his hand clenched so tight around his cane that his fingers ache. He tries to flex them, loosen his grip, but finds he can’t. He can feel tremor radiating up from inside him, threatening to shake him loose, and he bears down on it, refusing to let it get a hold of him. The only thing to do is change the topic. “So I’ll take that to mean you didn’t find his phone, then.”

She sighs. “Not that I can remember, no.”

“Right,” John says, preparing to hang up.

“Look,” she says, the words coming out rushed, “I know it’s none of my business, but what did Sherlock Holmes ever do for you to deserve this kind of devotion?”

“He noticed me.” The words are out of his mouth before he can think, and they’re truer than he realized. “For the first time since— I dunno, ever, someone _saw_ me, really looked, and— He didn’t turn away.” John shakes his head, blowing out a short breath against the tightening of his throat. “I can at least do the same for him.”

“That’s . . .” Her silence is one he can’t interpret.

“What?” John says defensively. “Sick? Hopeless? Delusional?”

“. . . Probably more than anyone’s done for him before,” she finishes. She clears her throat and then there’s a sound beyond, in her office, and she says, “I’ve got to go.”

She hangs up, leaving John alone with yet more questions he feels hopelessly ill equipped to answer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I am not even close to a forensic expert. Most of John's ballistics analysis here was worked out using my hair dryer because it was the only vaguely gun-shaped thing on hand. If anyone wants to pick this (or other elements) apart, please do!


	11. Chapter 11

Despite his desire to immerse himself entirely in his investigation, John still has to keep on going in to work. Within those wire-topped walls, nothing has changed. He treats a patient who’s been having violent night terrors, and plays a lot of poker with the insomniacs. Danny gets into a car accident and they’re temporarily short-staffed while looking for a suitable replacement. John volunteers to work a few extra shifts, hoping that he’ll run into Sherlock outside his regularly scheduled hours, but to no avail.

Sherlock has taken avoidance to a new level. John hasn’t seen hide nor hair of him since their confrontation in the hallway, which is impressive, considering they’re on a locked ward – although John knows by now that no door is ever really locked to Sherlock Holmes. 

He wishes he could discuss his findings so far with Sherlock. If anyone would be able to crack this case, it’s him. But Sherlock’s made it quite clear that he doesn’t want John involved.

He doesn’t know what he’d say, anyway. He keeps imagining Sherlock standing by the window where Donovan found him that night, keeps wondering what, if anything, he could have done to help him, but there’s no way to say that to someone, _I would’ve done anything to keep you from this fate._

He’s still not having any luck providing Sherlock with an alibi. He’s waded through all the crimes Moriarty’s been implicated in – murder after murder, dozens of thefts and forgeries, several daring abductions – but every attempt to corroborate Sherlock’s whereabouts at the time is foiled by an absolute lack of information about his day-to-day motions.

For a man with such a brilliant mind, Sherlock is apparently an abhorrent record keeper. He kept no sort of diary at all and the only name listed in his address book is that brother of his, Mycroft. Months of bills sit unopened around the flat, stuffed in between volumes on the bookshelf or piled up under empty teacups. He’s starting to think the chaos is intentional, the way he’s heard certain cities were designed to confuse invading armies. It’s one surefire way to foil anyone’s attempts to gather intelligence about him, at least. But it means that John is left sifting hopelessly through back issues of _Cigar Aficionado_ in the hopes of discovering something, anything, that will be of use.

He’s just about given up hope when he finally gets a response from Victor Trevor.

> Dr. Watson, 
> 
> It’s been a long since anyone’s mentioned Sherlock Holmes to me. I was at school with him, you’ve got that right, and I’m happy to answer whatever questions I can.
> 
> Victor Trevor

Below the signature is a telephone number, and John doesn’t hesitate before pulling out his mobile phone.

“Hello?” 

“Victor Trevor?” John’s throat is suddenly tight, his pulse humming. “This is, er— John Watson.”

Trevor laughs, a hearty sort of chuckle. “That was quick! I only just hit send.”

“Er,” John says. “I, ah, appreciate you getting back to me.”

“Of course. You said you were a friend of Sherlock’s?”

John bites his lip, wiggling a pen out of its cap one-handed and pulling a notepad within arm’s reach. “In a manner of speaking.”

“That’s Sherlock, all right,” Trevor says warmly.

“So you knew him?”

“Well, everyone _knew_ him. It would’ve been impossible not to. He was . . . larger than life.”

“Yeah,” John breathes, because that’s one way to put it. 

“He didn’t get on with most of the boys in our year. Or anyone in the other years. Or the staff, for that matter. That’s what happens, I guess, when you’re the smartest person in the room by a factor of ten and don’t have any talent for keeping that fact to yourself.”

Now it’s John’s turn to laugh, because that sounds _exactly_ right. “So you were friends.” 

There’s a pause on the line. “In a manner of speaking,” Trevor says, turning John’s own evasion back on him.

John feels some strange twist of – what, jealousy? Does Victor Trevor mean those words in the same way John does? Were they . . . involved, back then? (Are he and Sherlock “involved” now? John’s not sure the word applies.) “Actually, it’s not exactly Sherlock I wanted to ask you about.”

“Oh?”

“I’m really more interested in Richard Brook. I was wondering if you remembered him at all, if he was at school with you.”

“No.” The answer comes very quickly and very definitively.

“You’re sure?” John notices he’s tapping his pen on the notepad and forces his hand to stop. “Not even under another name, maybe? I mean, you’ve seen his picture? You’re sure you don’t recognize his face?”

“I’ve never met him,” Trevor says firmly, the humor gone from his voice. “I would remember if I had. That story he told _The Sun_ was true, although I don’t know where he heard it. Sherlock did slip that prefect something, but what he failed to mention to the papers was that the boy Sherlock poisoned hadn’t just been teasing him or pulling pranks. He’d devoted himself to Sherlock’s life a living hell from the moment he got there.” 

The relief John feels almost sends him listing out of his chair. 

“I don’t say this lightly, but that boy deserved worse.”

“Thank you,” John says, although the words don’t convey the full extent of his gratitude.

“How— How is he? Sherlock, I mean,” Trevor says. “We, ah . . . There was a—thing, over the long vac that last summer before university and I— In any case, we fell out of touch, after that. Is he— I mean, all things considered, is all right?”

“I—” John feels lost in a wash of conflicting emotions – relief to know there’s a crack in Moriarty’s façade, and disdain for Victor Trevor for giving up Sherlock’s friendship, and an intense sadness that he never got to know Sherlock as a teenager, that he wasn’t there to help him when it might actually have counted. “I really don’t know.”

*

John starts sleeping at Baker St. It is, after all, closer to the hospital, and time spent traveling back to his flat is time better spent building the case against Moriarty. Besides, the presence of Sherlock’s things around him is some small reassurance. It reminds him that there was a time before Sherlock had been committed, and it allows him to hope that there will be a time after, too.

He sleeps in the spare room upstairs, although sometimes he goes to sit in Sherlock’s room, just to breathe in the faint scent of him that lingers in the air. If he closes his eyes, he can imagine that Sherlock’s just in the next room, that he might return at any moment.

He’s sitting on Sherlock’s bed like that on day when the sound of his mobile ringing almost makes him duck for cover. He picks it up gingerly, as if it might do him mischief. “Hello?”

“You’re doing admirably, Dr. Watson,” says the familiar voice on the other end. “For an amateur.”

“Who is this?”

“Surely you remember me.”

John peers down at his phone’s screen, but the number is blocked. This clears things up considerably. In fact, it’s the first thing in a long while of which John is certain. “Why are you calling me?”

“I’m quite pleased to see you’re looking into Sherlock’s case. Although I think perhaps it’s time I offered you a little assistance.”

“I told you, I’m not interested in your money.”

“Assistance, John. Just that.”

“And why would you want to help me? Or Sherlock, for that matter.”

“Come now,” says the voice.

“Just trying to ease a guilty conscience?”

The man on the other end of the line, Mycroft, is silent for a long time. 

John lets out a sharp breath. “Why did you do it? You’re the only one who could’ve known all those things about him. How could you sell your brother down the river – and to someone like _him_ , of all people?”

When Mycroft speaks, all sense of play seems to be gone from his voice. “It seemed, at the time, the most expedient means to an end. I couldn’t see the danger in telling him a little detail here or there, and it was the only way we could make him talk.” He lets out a deep breath. “That was my mistake.”

“I’ll say it was,” John snaps. He’s surprised by the anger that rises up in him, though he really shouldn’t be. “And if you know so much, why is it you’re just letting him rot in there? Couldn’t you do something to help him, to have the hospital order lifted?”

“Never underestimate Sherlock, Dr. Watson. Once he sets his mind to a course of action, he will not be swayed.”

“But there must be something you can do—”

“And so I have: I’ve offered you my help. Will you take it, John?”

John considers. If he were cleverer – if he were Sherlock – he might be able to say no, but he’s just John, and he needs all the help he can get. “Yes, anything.”

“Excellent,” says the voice on the other end, and the call cuts off.

A moment later, his phone chimes, alerting him he has a new email. The sender’s address is a randomly generated string of numbers at some server he doesn’t recognize, but the attachment is a whole file of what look like stills from security cameras.

He expands the first image, and, sure enough, there’s Sherlock, striding down a busy street. It only takes John a moment to connect the timestamp on the photo to a murder Moriarty was supposed to have commissioned of a Chinese national a while back. The next shows him getting into a cab at the time when a crooked art dealer admitted she was in a teleconference with Moriarty to negotiate a deal on a forged painting. It goes on like this, alibi after alibi.

It’s true they’re not airtight, but it’s a step in the right direction, and it’s certainly better than John’s been able to do on his own so far. When viewed in combination with the information about the questionable details of Richard Brook’s life, it almost begins to seem like credible proof.

Still, he wishes he had some evidence that wasn’t circumstantial or conjectural. And yet, for whatever reason, this is exactly what Sherlock wanted, to erase all the evidence of his innocence. Why? What could possibly be so important that he’d be willing to throw away his entire life? Or was it simply that he’d given up, _lost the game_ , as he put it? He thinks with a chill of what Donovan said, that he’d tried to convince her not to call an ambulance for him.

Something stops him. The last time he spoke to her, Donovan said that when she arrived on the scene, Sherlock was standing by the window. But the window . . . “The window,” he murmurs, trying to force the thought to coalesce.

He digs the crime scene photos out of their file and flips through them until he finds one of the window in question. Sure enough, it’s open.

Why? Why would he have opened the window? If he were trying to kill himself that way, the drop from this floor wouldn’t have been lethal, and anyway the window’s only open a few inches.

With the picture in hand, he traces Sherlock’s steps from the fireplace to the window, which has since been closed. He pushes it up, filling the room with humid, chill air, and leans out. What could Sherlock have wanted to open the window for? To signal someone? To dispose of some evidence?

And then he sees it: down on the street, a faint glint in the thin sunlight – something caught in the window well of the basement apartment of 221.

Hurrying down the stairs as quickly as his cane will allow, John stumbles out onto the street and drops to his knees on the pavement, dipping his hand into the recessed window. 

So that’s it. Already in the throes of a fatal overdose, with Moriarty lying dead on the floor, Sherlock opened the window to get rid of his mobile. Which, as far as John can figure, can only mean that there was something he didn’t want the police to see – not evidence of his guilt, but of his innocence.

Back up the stairs he clatters, and into the kitchen, where the mobile fits perfectly into the charger still plugged in there. The screen remains black, and for a moment John wonders if it wasn’t damaged in the fall, but then the phone comes to life.

If it’s password-protected, he’s sunk, but against all odds, it goes straight to the home screen. It seems somewhat incredible that someone as clever as Sherlock would leave his mobile unlocked, but, then, someone as clever as Sherlock probably wouldn’t let his mobile fall into the wrong hands in the first place.

The first surprise is that there are virtually no numbers saved to the memory: just Lestrade’s mobile and office numbers, his brother Mycroft, and some place called Bangkok Garden. Somehow he would have expected someone with Sherlock’s connections to have a jam-packed address book. John hardly knows anyone since coming back to London, and his mobile is still full of people’s numbers. But, then, mad genius that he is, Sherlock probably keeps all those numbers in his head.

The second surprise comes when John opens Sherlock’s received messages and finds a text from a blocked number, dated the 3rd of July – right around the time Moriarty died. The image thumbnail is small and John has to enlarge it to get a better look, and even then it takes a moment to resolve the shapes into a sensible picture. When he does, he feels it all the way down to his knees. 

It’s a photo of Mrs. Hudson’s body on the pavement: the curve of her back in an aubergine dress, her legs, black stockinged, splayed at odd angles, the red of her blood spilling out onto the concrete.

For one lurching, seasick moment, he wonders if this was supposed to be confirmation of a hired hit. But then DI Donovan’s words come slamming back to him: _He said, ‘It’s my fault. I lost the game.’_

Sherlock didn’t commit suicide out of shame or remorse. He was coerced, Mrs. Hudson held over his head as a threat, and when he refused to comply, or didn’t comply quickly enough, she became collateral damage. His words to Donovan weren’t a confession of murder at all. They were an admission that he’d been bested, that Moriarty had won the game.

His first thought is blind, tearing rage: that someone would presume to manipulate Sherlock this way, that he would believe his only option was to die. But then another thought chills him: Sherlock didn’t die. If losing meant Sherlock had to kill himself, Sherlock didn’t follow through. He’s still alive, and even though Moriarty is dead, that doesn’t mean the game is over. Which means that Sherlock, and by extension Mrs. Hudson, are still in danger.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> John's comment about cities being designed to confuse invading armies is an oft-repeated but incorrect piece of trivia about Washington, DC. 
> 
> The date of Sherlock's final confrontation with Moriarty comes from Sherlockology's [estimate](http://sherlockology.tumblr.com/post/25016715568/sherlocks-death-date).


	12. Chapter 12

Objectively, John knows there’s no reason to panic. Sherlock and Mrs. Hudson may still be at risk for reprisals from some member of Moriarty’s crew, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen today. In fact, they’ve been safe for this long, so why should it be any different now?

Only, it is different. It’s different because John’s been looking into Sherlock’s case, trying to take Moriarty’s story apart. The closer he comes to proving Moriarty’s lie, the more danger Sherlock and Mrs. Hudson are in. The more danger _John_ has put them in. 

And who knows who’s been observing John’s progress? Mycroft’s obviously been keeping tabs on him, so who’s to say someone else doesn’t know John’s getting closer, too?

No, the only thing to do is to warn them now, before it’s too late.

John’s first impulse is to go directly to Sherlock. But Sherlock can take care of himself – even if his instinct for self-preservation is dubious at best – and the hospital is probably the safest place he could possibly be. Mrs. Hudson, on the other hand, isn’t, to John’s knowledge, quite so handy in a fight. And, well, John himself managed to get in to see her under false pretenses, which means anyone else could easily do the same.

John is shrugging on his jacket before he even realizes he’s doing it, slipping out of 221B, down the stairs, and out onto the street to hail a cab. 

In the back of the taxi, John checks his watch. It’s half-one. Visiting hours end at two, and the way traffic is right now, he’ll be lucky if the trip only takes thirty minutes.

Of course now, of all times, Marylebone is caught in gridlock. It’s midday, still lunch-hour rush. He reminds himself that there’s no reason to hurry, that everything will be fine. But still, his pulse is racing in his ears. In his jacket pocket, his fingers clench around Sherlock’s mobile, as if holding tight to it will somehow keep its owner safe.

They crawl through the city. Time seems to slow. Pedestrians on the pavement are making better time. In the front seat, the cabbie leans on his horn as someone cuts him off, oblivious to the panic rising up inside John.

If they were only there wasn’t all this traffic, if only they were going at a normal pace, he wouldn’t be so nervous. “Isn’t there another route you could take?” he says, trying to keep his tone even. 

The driver makes some excuse. John isn’t really listening.

“It’s just, I’m in a hurry.”

If anything, they seem to slow down. There’s some sort of massive pileup, the radio informs them. It takes every ounce of John’s restraint not to leap out of the cab and make a run for it.

When he finally reaches the hospital, John jumps out and throws some cash at the driver before pelting for the visitor’s entrance. It’s ten minutes after two. Surely they’ll let him in. They’ll have to.

“I’m sorry, sir,” the nurse tells him when he gets to the front desk. “Visiting hours are over.”

“I’m her nephew,” he says, the lie spilling up by rote.

She’s insistent. “I’m sorry, but we really can’t make exceptions.”

“It’s—” John stops himself. What was he about to say? _It’s an emergency, someone may be trying to assassinate her_? That’ll go over well. “It’s only, I’m going out of town and I promised I’d see her before I left – she’ll be so disappointed I didn’t make it.”

The nurse’s face flexes, and she sighs. “Fine. Five minutes. But as soon as the doctor comes, you’ll have to clear out.”

He must thank her, but he’s not really listening to the words that come out of his mouth. He brushes past the reception desk and strides down the hall. He’s wasted enough time already.

He hurries down the hall as fast as his cane will allow, cursing his leg the whole time. It occurs that he doesn’t really know what he’s going to say to her once he gets in there. She can’t very well defend herself, and it’s not as if John can check her out. If he had real evidence that there was a credible threat on her life, he might be able to convince Donovan to post an officer outside her room, but the chances of convincing Donovan of anything seem slim.

As he rounds the corner, he notices that Mrs. Hudson’s door is shut. The nurse at reception did say she was expecting the doctor, but panic flares through him all the same. 

He leans forward, listening—there’s no sound from within, not even the low murmur of a good bedside manner. He tries the handle—locked. Then, through the drawn shade, John spots a dark figure leaning over the bed. No white coat. Not a doctor. And so John does the only thing he can think of.

The first impact of his shoulder shudders the door against its frame. On the second, the hinges pop. The third time, the door flies open, revealing the broad-shouldered back of a man who is currently pressing a pillow against Mrs. Hudson’s face.

The man doesn’t even relax his arms when John bursts in, determined to get the job done no matter what. Mrs. Hudson’s nails are clawing at his wrists, her legs kicking out.

John doesn’t think, just launches himself at her assailant. John barrels into him full tilt and they pivot sideways onto the metal frame at the foot of the bed – John can feel the man’s ribs connect with it – before falling hard to the floor. The other man is bigger than John in every way – taller, heavier, more muscular – but John’s used to being the little guy. 

Sprawled on the attacker’s back, John does the logical thing and slams the man’s head onto the floor. His skull makes a sick thud against the linoleum, but John doesn’t stop. He’s pulling the man’s head up for another turn when the assailant reaches back and grabs John’s arms at the elbows. John realizes what’s happening just as he’s flipped over, his legs flailing wide through the air.

Connecting with the floor knocks the wind out of John and sends a cart bearing the remains of Mrs. Hudson’s breakfast clattering across the room, silverware and plastic plates crashing to the floor. The tall man takes the opportunity to get to his feet and land a heavy kick to John’s ribs. 

Mrs. Hudson seems to have recovered her breath now and is screaming for help. John can hear her only vaguely through the ringing in his ears. He has a moment to be glad she’s not dead before a second kick turns him over onto his side. He reaches out for some handhold, but his fingers close around something better: a butter knife, which he jams into the top of the attacker’s thigh.

The man snarls in pain and springs forward as if to tear John apart, but just then security bursts through the door, leaving him no option but to run. The guards cluster in the doorway, shouting, but Moriarty’s assassin puts both the guards on the ground without breaking his stride before disappearing down the hall. 

John struggles to get up off the floor, still dazed and breathless. He’s had worse, at least, and there’s no time to lie around. Having been prevented from making his move on Mrs. Hudson, Moriarty’s man will most certainly be headed for Sherlock next.

When he finally manages to push himself to his feet, he finds Mrs. Hudson sitting up in bed. Her face is flushed, her eyes wide and dark. Though her hands are shaking, she’s more composed than anyone has right to be moments after almost suffocating to death.

“Are you all right, John, dear?” she asks mildly. Clearly there’s a reason she and Sherlock got along so well.

“I think I should be asking you that,” he says, stepping close to check her vitals. Her pulse is a bit erratic, but that’s to be expected. All things considered, she’s surprisingly well. “You were right,” he tells her. “About Sherlock – about Moriarty – about everything.”

“Yes, dear, I know.”

He can’t help laughing, even though it sends a shooting pain across his ribs. He takes a deep breath, testing. They’re definitely bruised, hopefully no worse. 

“I’ve got to—Sherlock. I need to warn Sherlock.” Possibly he has a bit of a concussion as well.

She nods. “Go now, before they wake up.” 

They both spare a glance for the two unconscious guards.

“D’you think you can give the police a description of him? The man who—?”

Mrs. Hudson shakes her head. “Afraid not. I didn’t get a good look at him before he—”

John bites back on his frustration. “Me, either, unless you count the back of his head or his kneecaps.”

“It’s all right,” she says, soothing. “Go to Sherlock. Between the two of you, you’ll find him.”

John nods mutely. He doesn’t ask how Sherlock is going to be any use locked inside a secure ward. Considering what Donovan said about that night at the flat, he can’t help wondering if Sherlock might not even welcome the assassin’s arrival.

Elsewhere in the hospital, John can hear other security personnel rallying, and he makes a run for it. By now, it’s too late to try and follow the tall man’s tracks, but he has the feeling they’re both headed to the same place.

Out on the street, John hails another cab. Giving the address, he hesitates. He’d like nothing more than to stop back at home for his gun, but there’s no time – with his plans upset now, the tall man won’t hesitate to go straight for Sherlock, and there isn’t a moment to lose. Besides, there’s no chance John could get the gun through security at the hospital. He’ll just have to go it alone and hope that the tall man will be at a similar disadvantage.

*

At reception, they’re surprised to see him in the middle of the day, but he gives them a smile and some self-effacing excuse that he doesn’t remember the moment it’s out of his mouth. He’s fairly sure he’s not doing a good job of suppressing the panic suffusing his body, but they know him here, and, thankfully, they buzz him through.

Once he’s through security, he wants to fall into a dead run, but he knows it would only attract attention. Instead, he forces himself to walk at an even pace. He needs some kind of plan, but all he can think is _Sherlock_. 

The first place he checks is Sherlock’s room on B-block, but the dour little dormitory room is totally bare, save for the sheets on the bed. It doesn’t smell anything like Sherlock’s room at Baker St., he notes absently. There’s no scent here but dull, recycled air. Standing in the middle of the empty room, John forces himself to think.

He doesn’t know the daytime schedule very well, since he doesn’t spend much time here during the daylight hours. At this time of day, most patients are probably in group. John can’t very well go barging into a group session and start shouting about assassins, but that doesn’t mean he’s not going to try. He turns on his heel and walks as quickly as he dares down to the meeting rooms. He peers into each room through the little porthole on the door, but each room is empty of Sherlock. In one of the meetings, someone is sobbing. It’s not Sherlock. 

Sherlock isn’t anywhere.

He can’t just stand idly by and wait for Sherlock – or worse, his would-be killer – to simply turn up. Where is he? Where else would he be right now?

Taking a deep breath, John reminds himself that he’s at an advantage here, because he knows all of Sherlock’s usual haunts. 

The rec room is occupied by a small cluster of patients toying half-heartedly with a paltry selection of musical instruments, but no Sherlock. The library, too, is a dead end. John has high hopes for the secluded corridor where Sherlock often sneaks cigarettes, but there’s nothing there except for the phantom scent of smoke. 

Which leaves only one place. Turning on his heel, John heads down the hall in the direction of the roof access.


	13. Chapter 13

When John throws open the door to the roof, Sherlock actually looks surprised. The smoke curling out of his mouth is pulled back towards his lips as he draws breath to speak.

“Shut up,” John snaps, superseding whatever comment Sherlock is about to make. “You’re going to explain this to me.”

“Explain what?”

“This, for a start.” He holds out the mobile, with the picture of Mrs. Hudson’s bleeding body on the screen.

Sherlock goes stiff. “Where did you—”

“Don’t ask questions you already know the answer to.” John is advancing on him, the mobile outstretched. Sherlock stares at it, transfixed, his expression blank. “What I want to know is, how could you throw this away? You’ve had the proof you were innocent all this time. You had the proof right here and you just let yourself be—” He casts around for the right word, pulse throbbing in his throat. “—thrown in this _pit_ to rot.”

Sherlock is hardly breathing. “You don’t understand.”

“No,” John says shortly. “I get it. I do. Moriarty threatened to hurt her if you didn’t do what he said and so you did it. I worked that much out on my own, thanks.” He’s close now, the mobile screen right in front of Sherlock’s face. He should feel guilty, shoving the picture in his face like this, but he’s got no room for guilt. 

“He did threaten her, yes.” Sherlock’s eye flick away from the screen for a second but they’re drawn back immediately, as if he can’t stand to look away. “Her and Lestrade, actually, the only two people—” He lets out a sharp breath. “And do you know what I said?” 

John shrugs, letting his hand, with the mobile in it, fall limp to his side. How could he possibly know?

“I told him, ‘Go ahead.’” 

Ice spills through John at the thought and Sherlock smiles, though it’s an absent contortion of his lips, as if he doesn’t know his face is doing it. “You see? Not so innocent after all, am I? I did warn you.” He shakes his head. “You gave me too much credit, I’m afraid. I didn’t do what Moriarty wanted to save her. I just didn’t think it would matter to me whether she lived or died. I suppose I didn’t believe he could possibly hurt me.” He laughs, as though the thought still surprises him. “But he did.”

Something twists in John’s gut, pity or guilt or grief, but he can’t entertain it, doesn’t have room amidst the cold rage that swells up in him. “Well, it’s a good thing you don’t give a damn whether she lives or dies,” he bites out, “because someone came after her again today, only this time, you weren’t around to look after her.”

Sherlock’s shoulders jerk and he’s searching John’s face for the answer to the question he can’t find the breath to ask.

“She’s alive,” John says, although not to put him out of his misery.

The look of relief on Sherlock’s face is beautiful, heartbreaking, and it makes John so terrifically angry. Before he can stop himself, he’s reached out and grabbed a handful of Sherlock’s hair, pulling him close. “Do you understand what you’ve done?”

Sherlock stares at him with wide, dark eyes.

John shakes him, hand still tight in his hair. “Do you?”

“I lost,” Sherlock gasps.

“No, Sherlock. You didn’t lose. You gave up.”

“I lost, John. I _lost_. It was _my fault_. I wasn’t fast enough, or clever enough, I couldn’t—”

“No,” John snarls, “you forfeited the game. You stopped playing. But it isn’t over yet, Sherlock, not by half. The man Moriarty hired, whoever he is, he isn’t satisfied. You haven’t held up your side of the bargain – you lived. So he’s still playing until it’s over. He’s already tried again with Mrs. Hudson, and it’s only a matter of time before he comes for you.”

Distantly, John hears the door to the stairwell clang open. Sherlock glances down at him and John knows, just knows, that this is it – he’s here.

He releases his hold on Sherlock’s hair and turns to face the man standing in the doorway. He might be anyone, for all John recognizes him – if it weren’t for the shiny patch of blood on his thigh. John feels a brief flare of pleasure to know he managed to wound the man, at least.

“All right, lads.” The tall man’s expression is dispassionate as he advances on them, but in his voice there is a note of delight. He’s going to enjoy this.

Sherlock’s head inclines incrementally, almost a nod. “Moran.”

“Wh—” John sputters. “You knew about this?”

“ ‘Course he did,” the man, Moran, says. “You’ve been waiting for me, haven’t you, Mr. Holmes?”

“It took you long enough.”

Moran smiles. “I’m here now. Turn around, hands behind your heads.” 

“Why should we?” Sherlock asks lazily, as if he’s being asked to do some tedious household chore.

From his jacket pocket Moran produces a thin scalpel that John recognizes from the locked cabinets in the infirmary, and he feels a surge of envy because, damn, he should have thought of that.

Out of the corner of his eye, he sees Sherlock’s weight shift incrementally, preparing to strike. Moran must see it too, because the moment Sherlock moves, Moran is there, grabbing Sherlock’s arm cross-wise and twisting his weight, pulling Sherlock’s back flush against his chest. The scalpel presses against Sherlock’s throat, no less deadly for its small size. 

“Ah, there’ll be none of that,” Moran says, controlling Sherlock’s momentum as he tries to struggle.

“Sherlock.” The name is forced out of John’s throat.

“Search him,” Moran says to John.

Gritting his teeth, John steps forward to pat Sherlock down. He’s close enough that he can feel Sherlock’s chest heaving, smell the tang of fresh sweat on his skin. His hands move over Sherlock’s body in some grotesque parody of a caress, and John steadies himself by thinking about what he’s going to do to Moran as soon as he has the chance.

“If I can ask,” Sherlock says calmly, as if he’s just making small talk, “what finally made you decide to move?”

In the breast pocket of Sherlock’s shirt: two cigarettes. John drops them to the ground.

“It was clever of you, really, to go to ground here,” Moran replies. “Damned hard to get in, if you don’t have clearance. Lucky for me, one of the nurses had a little accident and a temporary position opened up.”

Back left pocket: a stolen ID card and a scrap of paper. These follow the cigarettes.

“Danny,” John says. “That was you?”

Front left pocket: Sherlock’s penlight. No good. John tosses it down with increasing desperation.

“Of course,” Sherlock puts in, although it seems he’s already losing interest in the conversation. He’s scuffing his feet against the ground, testing Moran’s grip, but Moran only holds him tighter. “And what will you do with me now, Moran?”

“Jim said he owed you a fall.”

Suddenly John feels the edge of the roof acutely behind him, as if the air is opening up a space for them, and everything in him goes still.

“Keep going,” Moran snarls at John, and he realizes he’s stopped searching.

“Yes, do keep up, John,” Sherlock says.

In Sherlock’s front right pocket: a small ring of keys, also, no doubt, stolen. Finally, something useful. John breathes a sigh of relief. 

Sherlock must hear it, because his eyes cut down to John’s, one eyebrow raised. “So a fall, is that it?”

His hand still inside Sherlock’s pocket, John slips one of the keys between his index and middle fingers, clenching its bow in his fist.

“I think we might owe you the same, don’t you, John?”

That’s all the warning Moran gets before John drives the blade of the key into his throat.

It’s not a clean blow, but it’s enough that Moran jolts in pain, giving Sherlock just enough room to roll Moran’s arm forward and slip his grip. Blood spills up from a gash in Sherlock’s neck, but it’s nothing compared to the ugly red hole in Moran’s. From the open gape of his mouth, John can tell he’s punctured Moran’s trachea. He tries not to relish the guttural rasping sound Moran makes, but it’s tough. 

Moran takes a staggering step forward, swiping at Sherlock with the scalpel, but Sherlock knocks it from his hand and follows that up with a swift snap-kick to Moran’s gut, propelling him back with the ball of his foot. But Moran’s big and although Sherlock’s kick is powerful, the assassin doesn’t go very far.

It’s enough, though, to give John a chance to dart in and grab the scalpel, which he jams between Moran’s ribs.

Red blooms on Moran’s abdomen, and for a moment he sways, eyes wide, but he doesn’t stop. The collar of his shirt is red, too, drenched from the puncture in his throat. He lurches forward again, still reaching for Sherlock. His feet tangle with one another as he takes one, two steps toward Sherlock, who has danced backwards, perilously close to the edge of the roof.

Moran grabs hold of Sherlock’s arm but his grip is weak and Sherlock twists him off, sending him reeling. Before he can regain his balance, Moran trips back against the ledge and disappears from view.

And then, suddenly, it’s just John and Sherlock alone on the roof, catching their breath.

Blood is slipping sluggishly from the cut on Sherlock’s throat, but John can see it’s not dangerously deep. He struggles out of his button-down and folds the shirt up, pressing it to Sherlock’s wound before shrugging his jacket back on over his vest. They’re standing nearly flush, John’s free hand bracing the back of Sherlock’s neck.

“That was—” Sherlock’s chest is heaving, his eyes wide. “That was really rather good.”

John can’t help the smile that cracks his lips. “It was, wasn’t it?” 

Sherlock makes a soft gasping sound, a soft “Ah—ah—” and then he’s laughing outright, a sort of wild laughter that is damnably infectious. Soon John is laughing, too, collapsing against Sherlock to support himself, although he’s not sure what’s so funny or why. Maybe the sheer absurdity of the moment – hell, of the past few weeks – has finally just become too much to bear. It feels good, to lean on Sherlock like this, to be close to him.

Sherlock recovers himself first and he straightens up, taking a step away from John, holding John’s jacket to his neck himself. “Security will be coming soon.”

John nods, feeling a chill set in now in the absence of Sherlock’s solid heat.

For a moment again there is silence between them. 

“You should go,” Sherlock says at last. 

“You can’t honestly think I’d leave you here to deal with this on your own, knowing what I do now.” His legs are shaking, but it’s adrenaline, not pain, and it feels incredible. “You don’t belong here, Sherlock, you never did. Somebody’s got to tell them the truth, and since apparently it’s not going to be you, it might as well be me.”

Sherlock’s expression folds into a frown. “I appreciate that, John,” he says carefully.

Gratitude is more surprising than any other reaction John could have anticipated. “Yes, well . . . You’re welcome.”

“But I do belong here. I told you that from the first.”

“No. Sherlock, no. Everything they believe about you is wrong.”

Sherlock’s frown deepens. “That really matters to you, doesn’t it?”

John doesn’t know what to say to that. _Yes_? Worse yet, _Yes, because I think I’m in love with you_? He shrugs. “It’s the truth.”

“The truth . . .” Sherlock lets out a heavy breath. Somewhere deep inside the building John can hear an alarm going off. “You thought I tried to kill myself because he coerced me, and . . . I can’t deny that I was—disturbed by the thought that I’d caused Mrs. Hudson harm. And yet . . .” He sighs. “It was so elegant, John.”

“Elegant?”

“Everything Moriarty accomplished. It was a work of art.” He shakes his head. “I think . . . Some part of me was simply loathe to destroy such a masterpiece.”

“Right,” John bites out. He’s not angry, exactly, although it feels like he ought to be. He can feel himself shutting down, a long corridor of doors slamming closed. “Right. So let me make sure I’m clear: you—the most brilliant person I’ve ever met—decided to—to throw away the rest of your life because you were _impressed_?”

“He beat me, John. He won.”

“He shot himself in the head. That doesn’t sound like winning to me.”

Sherlock shakes his head. Even now, the gleam of admiration is clear in his eyes. “It didn’t matter whether he was there to see it. What he put in motion was bigger than him, bigger than either of us. Giving in to that was— There was even a sort of pleasure in it.”

“And what about Mrs. Hudson? What about Lestrade? Your friends—”

“I don’t have friends,” Sherlock says. “I had him, the hunt for him, and now I don’t even have that. Why shouldn’t I ‘throw my life away’, as you put it? Isn’t that what people do, when they have nothing left to keep living for?”

“Right.” John can feel the ache in his thigh returning, real and threatening to drop him to the ground, and realizes he lost his cane in the scuffle in Mrs. Hudson’s hospital room. “Fine, I see.”

Behind them, the door to the stairwell clangs open again and several security guards spill out onto the roof, followed by the police. John drops Moran’s stolen scalpel and puts his hands up.


	14. Chapter 14

In the end, John is cleared of all wrong-doing. It takes some time – after all, he was found with a stolen weapon that was used to stab a man who then conveniently fell off a roof, but between his and Sherlock’s statements, Mrs. Hudson’s testimony, and some convenient security footage of Moran stealing the scalpel from the infirmary, they manage to convince the authorities that John attacked Moran in self-defense, and under extenuating circumstances. But John’s learned well enough by now that ‘innocent’ isn’t quite the same as ‘above reproach.’

He isn’t fired, but the hospital does ask him to leave. They’re very polite about it, and, frankly, he can’t blame them in the least. His behavior in regard to Sherlock has been unconscionable, and they don’t even know the worst of it. He’s lucky he hasn’t been struck off. 

He leaves quietly, clearing out his things with little fanfare. None of the evening staff comes to wish him well or say goodbye, except for Roland, who tries, with his typical blind disregard for good taste, to glean the details of John’s grapple with Sherlock’s would-be assassin. John assures him there’s really nothing to tell.

As for Sherlock, John doesn’t see him again. He half-expected Sherlock to turn up to say goodbye, and he’s ashamed to admit that he does linger a bit on his way out, hoping to catch sight of that lean figure in the hallways, the smoke of one of his contraband cigarettes wreathing his head. Most likely, they’ve got Sherlock on lock-down, and even if they didn’t, there’s no guarantee Sherlock would want to see him. In the end, what was John to Sherlock, really? Not even his friend, by Sherlock’s account.

John brings the evidence he’s accumulated to the police. He sits in D.I. Donovan’s office in New Scotland Yard and squints into the bleak morning light as she reviews the information he compiled about the non-existent talent agency that represented Richard Brook, Victor Trevor’s testimony, and the mobile phone photograph of Mrs. Hudson’s body. He watches her page through the surveillance photos Mycroft sent, each of which John’s matched up to the crime it alibis. 

“Do I even want to know how you got these?” she asks.

John shakes his head. “Does it really matter?”

“I suppose not.”

John looks out the glass windows behind Donovan’s desk, at the clouds moving quickly over the city below. “Is it enough?”

“Maybe,” Donovan says. “After what happened at the hospital, and to Holmes’s landlady, it’s enough, at least, to raise some questions.”

“And Lestrade?”

She nods. “This’ll be good for him. He defended Sherlock to the last. If it turns out he was right . . . It’ll help.”

“And what about you?” John asks. “What’ll it take for you to admit you were wrong about him?”

Donovan meets his eyes, her expression cool, defiant. “You can’t say you don’t understand why we believed it.”

“No,” John says slowly, “I know exactly why you believed it. But that doesn’t mean you were right.”

She lets out a little half-laugh. “He’s lucky to have you, you know.”

John’s lips twist into something that might almost be a smile. “Well, he doesn’t ‘have me,’ so—” He shrugs, rising from his chair. “Let me know when you get a result.”

*

Almost two years since he returned from Afghanistan, John is right back to where he was when he first got home: alone, unemployed, sleepless and watching shadows crawl across his ceiling in the quiet dark night.

When he does sleep, he often dreams of Sherlock, although he forces himself to forget the particulars. He doesn’t trust himself with the memory.

He still doesn’t know what he ought to do next. For a brief moment, standing at Sherlock’s side, it seemed that there might be some future for him, some chance. But Sherlock didn’t believe in that possibility, and John finds it easier to convince himself it never existed than to linger on what might have been.

He’s still going through the motions. It’s surprisingly easy to do, really, pure muscle memory. Without even having to think about it, he looks for work, cleans his flat, runs errands.

He’s leaving Tesco one morning when a sleek black car pulls up alongside the curb. He doesn’t pay it any mind at first, until he’s gone one block, then two, and it’s still slinking along beside him, keeping pace. When he stops, the window goes down and a handsome woman in a sharp suit says, “Mr. Holmes would like a word with you.”

For a moment, his lungs contract, but just as quickly he realizes that this level of pageantry suggests the other brother, Mycroft. “And why would I want to speak to him?”

She blinks at him, elaborately slow, as if she’s just waiting for him to do what they both know he’s going to do in the end. So he saves them both the trouble of any further conversation and just gets in.

The ride is silent, John’s shopping sitting between them on the seat. He figures there’s no sense in asking where they’re going. In any case, he doesn’t really care.

When the car stops in a long back alley, John is escorted into a freight elevator and, several floors up, led into an empty suite of offices that John is certain doesn’t belong to Mycroft. The man in question is standing by the plate glass windows, his back to the door. Once again he’s leaning on that damn umbrella.

“I don’t know what else you could possibly have to say to me,” John says from the doorway. “I did what you wanted. We’re done.”

Mycroft turns, one eyebrow raised in some imperious question John can’t comprehend. “I’m afraid not, John.”

“I did what I could to help Sherlock. It’s not my fault he wouldn’t accept it.”

“Oh, Sherlock will be discharged, there’s no question of that,” Mycroft says calmly.

John feels his teeth grind together. “Then what?”

“I wanted to express my gratitude.”

“And for that you needed to kidnap me off the street?”

Mycroft inclines his head demurely.

“Right. Well, I didn’t do it for you.”

“No,” Mycroft says. “You did it for Sherlock. And for that, I find myself . . . most grateful of all.” He dips his head, almost a bow. 

John doesn’t know what to say to that, so he doesn’t say anything at all.

*

The next time he gets a call from Scotland Yard, he braces himself for another awkward conversation with Donovan, but instead it’s Lestrade’s voice on the other end of the line.

“You really came through for me, John,” Lestrade says. “I didn’t think you’d be able to do it, but you did.”

“I didn’t do much at all, really.” In truth, almost everything he’s accomplished has been achieved by accident or through the help of others. And everything he did discover, Sherlock already knew all along, so it’s not even as if he covered any new ground. For that matter, he may have done more harm than good, if his poking around was what encouraged Moran to pick up where he left off.

“But you got a result, didn’t you?”

“Did I?” He’s glad things are looking up for Lestrade, but as far as he can see, not much has changed – certainly not for Sherlock.

There’s a moment of still silence on Lestrade’d end. “You haven’t heard, have you?”

And then John’s heart is in his throat. “Heard what?”

“Sherlock’s out,” Lestrade says. “Or, he will be. They’re releasing him.”

He knows he should be happy. This is what he wanted, what he was working so diligently for. And yet, as he looks around his pale, impersonal flat, he can’t help feeling . . . exhausted. He tried so hard to prove Sherlock innocent, and what does he have to show for it?

“I would’ve thought Sherlock would’ve phoned to tell you himself.”

John swallows. “No, I—” It occurs to him that Sherlock doesn’t even have John’s number. Not that he would call if he did. “I haven’t heard from him.”

“Oh.” Lestrade makes a little hum of reproval. “Well, I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised. Not really versed in social graces, is he?”

He laughs drily, although the sound sticks in his throat. “I’m expecting a thank you card any day now.”

Lestrade is silent for a moment. Then, he takes a deep breath. “Listen, you need anything, anything at all, you just let me know. I owe you one.”

“You don’t owe me anything,” John says, and he has to stop for a second because he isn’t quite breathing properly. “But if you happen to see him—” 

John can’t finish the sentence, but Lestrade seems to understand. “I will.”

*

After Lestrade’s call, he half-wonders if he’ll hear from Sherlock, but he doesn’t hold out much hope. He knows he could go see Sherlock himself, but Sherlock made it quite clear that he wanted nothing to do with John, in the end.

He does, however, go to see Mrs. Hudson after she’s finally released from hospital. It’s strange, coming back to Baker St. now. For a little while, it had almost begun to feel like home. 

Just as he did the first time, John stops on the street outside of 221 and looks up at the second-floor windows. The glass reflects the midday light, making it impossible to see inside, and he wonders whether Sherlock has been discharged yet, whether he is back home—whether he is here.

When he knocks, Mrs. Hudson opens the door and embraces him warmly, as if they’ve known one another for years. He supposes saving someone’s life does create a certain sort of intimacy.

She shows him into her flat on the first floor and leads him straight to the kitchen, where she busies herself making tea.

As she measures leaves out into the pot, she says, “It was so good of you to tidy Sherlock’s flat while you were here.” 

“Oh, well—” He clears his throat, trying hard not to think about the fact that Sherlock might well be just upstairs. “Yes.”

“I hated thinking of it in such a state while I was stuck in hospital. But, of course, there was nothing I could do. And they kept me such an awfully long time!”

“You seem to be doing much better.”

“As well as can be expected, anyway, at my time of life,” she says brightly. “The doctors were all very impressed at how well I’ve bounced back, particularly since I was almost murdered not once, but twice.” 

John chuckles. “That’ll certainly make them think twice before trying anything on you next time.”

“Oh, let’s hope there’s not a next time, dear. I don’t know what I’d do.” She smiles, setting a tray of pastries on the table in front of John. “Although, knowing Sherlock, I’m sure there will be.”

A hush falls over the kitchen, like a company remembering a fallen comrade. Only Sherlock is fine. The only person he’s lost to is John.

John tries, and fails, to resist the urge to ask. “Is he—?”

“He’s not here.” John’s stomach drops. “At the moment,” she adds, and then John can breathe again. “He went out early this morning on some business – I don’t know what, but, then, I never do.” 

The kettle boils, and Mrs. Hudson fills the pot before sitting down across from John at the little table. “You should go up and see him when he gets back.”

“Oh, I . . .” John wants to make some excuse, but can’t find any words that even begin to approach what he wants to say.

She reaches across the table and takes his hand, her soft, lined palm clasped over his fingers. “I’m sure he’ll be home soon. You can wait here with me until he gets back.”

John smiles and nods. He’ll stay for now, take tea with Mrs. Hudson, but he’ll leave as soon as Sherlock arrives. He doesn’t think he could bear to see him. It’s better just to make a clean break, put this all behind him.

“There’s a good lad,” she says, squeezing his hand. “Now, then, tell me what you’ve been up to.”


	15. Chapter 15

They’re on their second pot of tea when the front door to 221 slams open and then shut and a flurry of footsteps rush up the stairs. John can hear Sherlock – he recognizes that reckless gait – moving around what must be the sitting room, and then, a moment later, Sherlock bellows, “Mrs. Hudson!”

“Why don’t you go up, dear?” she says. “It would be a nice surprise for him.”

John can’t deny that Sherlock would probably be surprised, but he suspects that ‘nice’ is the last word Sherlock would use describe an unexpected visit from him. “Actually, I can’t. I’ve really got to be going. I, er— Things to do.” All the excuses he’s planned in the past hour dry up, leaving him sputtering.

“Don’t be silly. Go on.”

“Mrs. Hudson!” comes the call a second time.

“I can’t, really. I—”

There’s a clattering on the back stairwell and then all of a sudden Sherlock is in the room, tall and lean and imperious in a sharp-cut suit. He begins to speak to Mrs. Hudson but pulls up short when he sees John at the table. His mouth snaps shut and he is suddenly stiff, his shoulders brittle tense.

“You,” he says.

John gestures to the door. “I was just leaving.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Mrs. Hudson interjects. “You’ll do no such thing.”

“Really, Mrs. Hudson, it’s no problem. I’d better be getting off.”

“To do what?” Sherlock asks sharply.

“Ah—” The lie, whatever it was he’d devised to get him out of this situation, still won’t come to him.

Sherlock’s eyes narrow. He takes a small breath and then starts in: “Given that you’ve let your hair grown out – don’t want to waste money on a haircut – and that you’re making social calls in the middle of the day, it’s clear you’re still unemployed, so it’s not as if you have to be getting to work. You might have an interview, but if that’s what you call dressing to impress, it’s no wonder you still haven’t found a position.”

“Sherlock!” Mrs. Hudson scolds, but he keeps talking unabated.

“So no job, no interview. Could be you’re meeting someone – coffee with an old friend, maybe even a date – but you worked the night shift for two years after returning home from Afghanistan, it’s unlikely that you’ve made many friends, and any you do have probably keep the same schedule you did before you were sacked. Now, you might have errands to run, but there’s nothing so pressing that you can’t afford to do it later, or else you wouldn’t have sat here letting Mrs. Hudson stuff you full of two—” He squints at John’s plate. “—No, three Bakewell tarts.”

It’s incredible, how he does that. John can feel himself leaning into it like a warm touch, even as the detached tone of Sherlock’s ruthless observations threaten to flay him alive.

“Which is to say,” Sherlock concludes, “there’s no conceivable reason you shouldn’t come up.” His lips twitch as if he’s making a painful concession. “Five minutes. And then, if you still have to attend to whatever pressing grocery shopping it is you have to do, you’ll be free to go.”

*

John follows Sherlock up the back stairs, and for a moment, they stand there in the kitchen of 221B, sizing one another up in silence. It’s strange to see Sherlock outside of the hospital – to be here, in Baker St., with him at last.

“Tea?” Sherlock asks abruptly. Without waiting for an answer, he sets the kettle to boil and starts clattering in the cupboards for mugs. “You certainly made yourself at home.” 

“Er—” Mrs. Hudson was grateful to John for tidying the flat, but it occurs to him now how invasive it must seem to Sherlock, who returned home to find his flat different than he left it, organized by a virtual stranger. “Yeah, sorry.” 

“You _cleaned_ ,” he says, and John can’t tell if this is approval or reproach.

“I did, a bit.”

Finally Sherlock locates the mugs and snaps two down on the counter, dropping tea bags into them. The silence starts filling up the space between them again. This was a bad idea, John decides. He should never have come.

“You’ve not been using the cane, I see.”

“No,” John agrees. “No need. Somebody told me the limp was psychosomatic.”

Sherlock glances over at him with a half-smile on his lips, but whatever he sees in John’s expression causes it to stutter and fade.

The kettle clicks off and Sherlock pours the tea but doesn’t offer a cup to John. Instead, he lights a cigarette, drags heavily on it.

“You ought to quit those, you know.”

The arch look Sherlock gives him makes John laugh despite himself. “You survive a drug overdose and an assassination attempt, but you’re fine smoking yourself into an early grave? You really are—”

“Mad?” Sherlock cuts in. “Apparently not.” He takes a significant look around the flat, gesturing broadly to suggest his status as a free man. The smoke from his cigarette trails a delicate arc across the air.

“Yes, how did you manage it? They don’t just release people from psychiatric care at the drop of the hat.”

“Called in a favor with the Home Office,” Sherlock says, as if this is nothing at all. “Well, Home Secretary, really.”

For a moment, John just stares at Sherlock, the absurdity of this crashing over him. “So that was your plan all along? You went along with Moriarty’s attempt to discredit you, got yourself banged up on purpose, and hid out in the psych ward in order to draw Moran to you on safe ground, knowing all the while that, once you’d cleared your name, you could just _call in a favor_ and go free?”

Sherlock’s brows draw together, his lips twitch. He glances at John, then away. “There was no plan.”

“There—” John leans in, wondering if he’s misheard. “What?”

“I didn’t have a plan.” He inclines his head, a small concession. “At first, I thought I saw a way out, but then he”—His eyes dart toward the parlor, to the mantelpiece John so diligently scrubbed clean of blood.—“forced my hand. I wasn’t . . . I couldn’t see any way forward, not without him. 

“After that, it’s true, I did go along with Moriarty’s efforts to frame me, but not with any view of clearing my name. I told you, I couldn’t resist the idea, it was so perfect, so—neat. It seemed only fitting.

“It wasn’t until later, after I’d been arrested, that I realized, as you did, that it wasn’t really over. By surviving, I’d failed to fulfill the terms of his plans, leaving Mrs. Hudson and Lestrade vulnerable again. 

“I knew that if the case came to trial, I couldn’t do anything to contradict my public image for fear of putting them in further danger, but I also knew prison wasn’t an option – it would have been far too easy for one of his agents to arrange my murder, or worse. A hospital order seemed the safest option: still reasonably secure, but with a slightly lower risk of being infiltrated by Moriarty’s allies – although we both saw how well that worked out.”

“You’re welcome for that, by the way,” John says.

Sherlock clears his throat. “Yes, well.”

“So that’s it, then?” John asks. “You just fell headlong into this, with no idea of how you’d get yourself out.”

“I wasn’t entirely alone. I had Mycroft’s help.” His lip curls incrementally. “He was the one who pulled all the appropriate strings to have the hospital order approved, and he agreed to keep Baker St. – for Mrs. Hudson, even if I couldn’t go back.”

“You really thought you’d never come back.”

Sherlock jerks his shoulder, a convulsive shrug. “I’m here now, aren’t I?”

“Right.”

Sherlock lets out a huff. “It was . . . different, after you.”

John can’t seem to let himself look directly at Sherlock, but he keeps him carefully at the edge of his field of vision, because he can’t bear to take his eyes off him, either. “After I what?”

Sherlock hesitates on the verge of saying something, but seems to change his mind at the last moment. “Once you took an interest in the case, it occurred to me that I could simply let you do the work to clear my name, and I wouldn’t be in breach of Moriarty’s deal, since it wouldn’t be me who’d exposed the lie.”

“So what you’re saying is, if it weren’t for me, you’d still be in there.”

Sherlock draws up short, his eyes cutting away from John again. “I’m still not entirely convinced I shouldn’t be.”

“No,” John says, his breath coming short in his chest. “Sherlock, just—no.”

“I was prepared to let her die, John. I didn’t think it mattered.”

“But that’s not what you think now.”

“I’m not sure I—” He shakes his head. “Moriarty was more like me than you know, two sides of a coin. There was something . . . broken in him and if I’m any different, it’s only by accident.”

John lets out a deep breath, because hold it in hurts too much. “You told me once that I couldn’t fix you or solve you or save you, and, d’you know what? You were right.” He shakes his head. “I can’t fix you, because there’s nothing in you that needs to be fixed.”

Sherlock tips his head to stare out into the sitting room, taking a long drag on his cigarette, his face hidden from John’s view, although he can hear something ragged in Sherlock’s breathing. John worries that he’s said too much, crossed some line. Sherlock’s made it clear he doesn’t want John’s help, and it was presumptuous of him to assume Sherlock would need his approval, either.

“So, er . . . What will you do now?” John asks, although he’s not sure he wants to know the answer.

“I’ll work,” Sherlock says matter-of-factly, flicking ash from his cigarette into the sink. “There’s just the work now.”

And John is briskly reminded that there’s never really been any room for him in Sherlock’s life, free or not. For a brief moment, he’d let himself believe that there might be, but he was wrong. There’s just the work.

But at least that’s something for Sherlock to live for. There may be no place for John in that work, but at least Sherlock will keep on doing it. “That’s . . . That’s good, I’m glad.”

Sherlock turns his attention back to John, catching him in that sharp gaze. “And you? What will you do now?”

All the breath seems to collapse out of John’s lungs. “I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “I haven’t the slightest idea.”

Sherlock is silent for a moment. He ashes his cigarette again, even though it hasn’t burned down far enough to need it. “It did occur to me that, seeing as you’ve nothing else on, you might . . . stay.”

“What, here?” The words are surprised out of him, and it’s only once he’s said them that he realizes Sherlock is serious.

“Of course here,” Sherlock says indignantly. “Where else?”

“As what?”

Sherlock opens his mouth – no doubt to make some snide comment – but John cuts him off.

“No, really, Sherlock. What would I be to you, if I stayed?” He can feel his hands shaking and clenches them so it doesn’t show. “Your doctor? Your assistant? Live-in chef? Because I’m not your friend, Sherlock. You said so yourself. I hardly even know you.”

Sherlock crushes the burned-down cigarette out in the sink and closes the distance between them. In a few steps, he’s so close that John can once again smell that taut mixture of smoke and skin and he feels it all the way down to his knees. Sherlock’s fingers are sliding along the sides of John’s face, tipping his head up to meet his eyes – those clear, colorless eyes – and then Sherlock is leaning down to kiss him, dry lips against his, the smell of smoke on his teeth, the warm taste of his tongue. John breathes into that kiss, wants to breathe into it forever.

Sherlock says: “Stay.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> And that's it, folks. Thanks so much for sticking with this, and for all your lovely comments along the way!

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Emily Dickinson. 
> 
> I'm writing about mental healthcare in the UK from the perspective of someone who's not experienced mental healthcare in the UK first-hand. I've done my best to be informed, but I've also taken some liberties for the sake of the story. That said, I would heartily welcome comments and critiques on this subject -- or any subject, really.


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